Ever since her breakout film La Ciénaga (2001), Lucrecia Martel has remained one of the most exciting directors in world cinema. Her meticulous approach to craft, combined with her razor-sharp commentary on race and class in Argentina, has earned her multiple awards and a distinct prestige among contemporary arthouse filmmakers. With her new film Landmarks, a documentary about the murder of indigenous activist Javier Chocobar, playing at the 63rd New York Film Festival, we’re proud to present one of her most recent short films.

Maid was commissioned as part of an interdisciplinary arts project led by Mexico City’s FICUNAM film festival. Martel has stated FICUNAM asked her to make a film that linked the language of contemporary dance and cinema. Shot in a relentless rhythm, Martel’s 12-minute short about a hospitality worker navigating a family crisis combines her perceptive storytelling with a gripping choreography orchestrated by Argentine contemporary dancer Juan Onofri Barbato.

“I decided to focus on the continuous movement of the body, and the discontinuous movement of audiovisual language, in an exercise about linear and nonlinear time. Fortunately, where an intention fails, another one emerges destined to fail sooner or later.” LUCRECIA MARTEL

As in her other films, Martel constantly gestures at violence happening outside the frame in Maid. The titular character (newcomer Jorgelina Contreras in a terrific performance) is hounded by ominous phone calls throughout the film, torn between the tasks she must perform for work and a difficult situation occurring off-screen. Martel stresses this tension, leaning into the erratic movements of a woman who is being pulled in multiple directions at once by shifting her film from one genre to another. To quote the Argentine film critic Lucía Salas, “in twelve minutes, Lucrecia Martel makes three films: a labor drama, then a thriller, then a diva melodrama.”

Lucrecia Martel was born in Salta, Argentina, in 1966. As part of the New Argentine Cinema that reignited interest in the South American nation’s film scene around the turn of the millennium, Martel carved out a unique voice with films about twisted class and family dynamics in some of the country’s more provincial corners. Her feature debut La Ciénaga (2001) remains a major work of Latin American cinema, and the films that followed have proven equally distinctive. Per NYFF’s Artistic Director Dennis Lim, “she is nothing less than one of contemporary cinema’s true visionaries.”

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer.