Harvard Film Archive

Lucrecia Martel and Palestine Documentary Today

..

Three Films by Lucrecia Martel

October 11-13, Director in Person
Director Lucrecia Martel in Person
La Ciénaga (The Swamp)
Saturday October 11 at 7pm
Martel’s remarkably accomplished debut feature unfurls vivid, contrasting portraits of two branches of the same gnarled family tree—one locked in an inexorable decline and the other struggling to survive – both living near La Ciénaga, the town whose name stands as the film’s central metaphor. The bravura opening of the film releases a controlled rush of richly orchestrated sounds and sensorially evocative images— ice, aged flesh, thunder, blood—that immediately reveals the masterful control of mood and rhythm which Martel exerts throughout the film. Told in a distinctly observational mode of narrative, Martel’s film seems almost plotless, a wandering spotlight that focuses selectively upon the flawed and fragile characters depicted by its incredible ensemble cast, led by 1960s and 1970s matinee star Graciela Borges as the possessive, alcoholic matriarch.
Directed by Lucrecia Martel. With Mercedes Morán, Graciela Borges, Martín Adjemián
Argentina 2001, 35mm, color, 103 min. Spanish with English subtitles
Director Lucrecia Martel in person
Special Event Tickets $10
La niña santa (The Holy Girl)
Sunday October 12 at 7pm
In her mesmerizing follow-up to La Ciénaga, Martel offers an alternately dark and playful allegory about religion, desire and familial guilt focused on two mischievous girls unable to distinguish between their spiritual and sexual yearnings. Martel’s meticulous attention to sound is elevated to a major theme of La niña santa, which uses its extraordinarily subtle soundtrack to explore the ineffable, musical texture of voice and the fallibility of language. Set largely within a hotel, where a group of ear, nose and throat doctors have gathered for their annual conference, La niña santa transforms the accidental triangle that emerges between a girl, a promiscuous doctor and her mother into a fascinating prism of refracted, contradictory desire.
Directed by Lucrecia Martel. With Mercedes Morán, Carlos Belloso, Maria Alché
Argentina 2004, 35mm, color, 106 min. Spanish with English subtitles
Director Lucrecia Martel in person
Special Event Tickets $10
The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza)
Monday October 13 at 7pm
The mysterious and austere final installment of Martel’s Salta trilogy moves away from the layered narratives of her earlier films to adopt the intense, almost hallucinatory, first-person perspective of a successful dentist uncertain of her responsibility for a hit-and-run accident that may or may not have taken place. In tune with the heroine’s intense post-traumatic state, The Headless Woman lingers on the puzzling clues that emerge in a miasma of guilt and denial that gradually implicates everyone around her. Martel’s characteristically minimal story is also her darkest and most explicitly political statement, offering a pointed critique of class inequity and bourgeois indifference.
Directed by Lucrecia Martel. With María Onetto, Claudia Cantero, César Bordón
Argentina 2008, 35mm, color, 87 min. Spanish with English subtitles

Palestine Documentary Today

October 10-12
The Roof (Al-sateh)
Friday October 10 at 7pm
Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari’s poetic and political film records his journey back to his family and homeland and explores his firm conviction that “home” can be a feeling as well as an actual place. Aljafari’s voyage is less a definite search for memories than an attempt to view the present as a living past. As his camera pans slowly around the rooms of homes inhabited, damaged and ruined, past and present collide. The use of stillness and off-screen space creates a sense of suspension, of time spent waiting, of aftermath, of lives lived elsewhere. Aljafari has won praise for “raising anecdote to the level of allegory, enabling the film to trace meditative paths and rhythms.”
Directed by Kamal Aljafari.
Palestine/Germany 2006, video, color, 60 min. Arabic with English subtitles
Preceded by
Around
A car trip with four young filmmakers on their way from Jenin to Ramallah for their favorite pizza is considerably lengthened and complicated by a labyrinth of Israeli checkpoints.
Directed by Mohanad Yaqubi.
Palestine 2007, video, color, 3 min. Arabic with English subtitles
and
Rico in the Night
This collaboration between French choreographer Jean Gaudin and Palestinian filmmaker Mohanad Yaqubi presents a nighttime tour of Ramallah, animated by Gaudin’s eccentric but gentle propulsive movements.
Palestine/Belgium 2007, video, color, 8 min.
33 Days (33 Yaoum)
Friday October 10 at 9pm
Famed documentary filmmaker Mai Masri, a Palestinian living in Lebanon, shows us life on the ground during the 2006 Israeli invasion. Beirut is turned upside down in a torrent of Israeli shells and bombs as refugees from the south arrive. Masri focuses on the experience of a small group of individuals, including a relief worker, a theater performer who organizes workshops and performances with traumatized and displaced children, and a television journalist. Their activity is presented straightforwardly; the drama is in the situation and in the images themselves. Masri’s camera also captures a lasting legacy of the invasion: Lebanese praise for Hezbollah for having withstood the Israelis.
Directed by Mai Masri.
Lebanon 2007, video, color, 70 min. Arabic with English subtitles
Preceded by
The Shooter (El-Takeekh)
Detached from the daily horrors of the occupation, Ramallah filmmaker Ihad Jadallah nonetheless often finds himself compelled by producers, funders, collaborating artists and viewers to present himself and his work in accordance with a “meta-script” composed of victims, violence and shooters. Jadallah’s film is at once a parody and a rejection of these constraints.
Directed by Ihab Jadallah.
Palestine 2007, video, color, 7 min. Arabic with English subtitles
The Roof (Al-sateh)
Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari’s poetic and political film records his journey back to his family and homeland and explores his firm conviction that “home” can be a feeling as well as an actual place. Aljafari’s voyage is less a definite search for memories than an attempt to view the present as a living past. As his camera pans slowly around the rooms of homes inhabited, damaged and ruined, past and present collide. The use of stillness and off-screen space creates a sense of suspension, of time spent waiting, of aftermath, of lives lived elsewhere. Aljafari has won praise for “raising anecdote to the level of allegory, enabling the film to trace meditative paths and rhythms.”
Directed by Kamal Aljafari.
Palestine/Germany 2006, video, color, 60 min. Arabic with English subtitles
Jerusalem, the Adulterous Wife
This film juxtaposes archival footage of archaeological digs in Jerusalem with quotations of Biblical punishment for adultery for an oblique but provocative look at Jerusalem’s status as an ancient city and territory claimed by both Palestine and Israel.
Directed by Matthias de Groof.
Belgium 2008, video, color, 8 min.
Two Houses and a Longing
A young Israeli filmmaker reconstructs what she can of the lives and experiences of the former Palestinian residents of two houses now in Israeli hands.
Directed by Dorit Naaman.
Israel 2007, video, color, 15 min. Hebrew with English subtitles
Visit the Harvard Film Archive website