29 Facts About Lucrecia Martel

Lucrecia Martel was born on December 14,1966 and is an Argentine film director, screenwriter and producer whose feature films have frequented Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, and many other international film festivals.

The second of seven children, Lucrecia Martel was born and raised in Salta.

Lucrecia Martel's parents met in university and got married at 24 years old.

In primary school, Lucrecia Martel's uncle helped her develop interests in mythology, Greek, and Latin languages.

Lucrecia Martel's parents opposed the school because of its elitist tradition which they felt reinforced class differences, but, because of the school's prominent alumni and Martel's intellectual curiosity, they did not stop her from her pursuit.

Since she came from a "solidly middle class" family, as she stated in a revealing 2008 interview with BOMB Magazine, Lucrecia Martel felt like an outsider at the school.

Lucrecia Martel was especially fascinated by the way her grandmother used different sounds, tones, and carefully selected pauses to establish "atmosphere" in her scary, fantastical stories.

Lucrecia Martel first used a video camera when she was "15 or 16" years old, she says, after her father bought one to store memories of their large family.

Not wanting to neglect her interests in the technical and the creative, while at the University of Buenos Aires she enrolled in a nighttime animation course at the Film Art Institute of Avellaneda located about 5.5 miles away, which Lucrecia Martel describes was a significant commute at the time.

Since over 1,000 people signed up for the exam and only 30 vacancies existed at the school, applicants were required to take a "huge qualifying course", which Lucrecia Martel says she spent months preparing for.

Lucrecia Martel says that "just when [she] was starting to think that [a career in] film was impossible, that it was time for [her] to get a job," she entered a public script competition organized by the Argentine National Film Board, the grand prize for which was the budget to produce a short film.

Lucrecia Martel won the contest and, as a result, was able to produce her breakout film Rey muerto, a violent western about a woman who escapes her abusive, alcoholic husband with her three children in a small town called Rey Muerto in provincial Salta.

Lucrecia Martel explains that this compilation film was "unprecedented in the country" and came about after all the directors of the other winning short films in the script contest banded together and visited the INCAA headquarters in Buenos Aires repeatedly to ask the contest organizers to premiere all the short films as a string of films in a theater.

Lucrecia Martel says that the premiere of Historias breves was "very successful" and drew 10,000 viewers.

The jury recommended that she re-write the script to follow a more traditional structure around one or two protagonists, but Lucrecia Martel chose instead to retain the script's diffuse nature.

In 2001, Lucrecia Martel was selected for the third edition of the Cannes Film Festival Cinefondation artist-in-residence program, designed to inspire and support young international filmmakers working on their first or second feature film.

Lucrecia Martel's work is finely tuned to the particular rhythms and values of provincial middle-class Argentina, a world whose economic stagnation and moral bankruptcy she dissects through narratives that play on viewers' sympathies by constantly shifting between favorable and unfavorable perspectives on her characters.

Lucrecia Martel's work has attracted a good deal of academic attention.

In May 2008, Lucrecia Martel was reported as slated to direct the film adaptation of The Eternaut, the very popular Argentine science fiction comic strip created by Hector German Oesterheld and Francisco Solano Lopez in 1957 about a toxic snowfall and alien invasion of Buenos Aires.

Lucrecia Martel delivers her most abstract, most ungraspable, most mysterious creation yet.

In May 2018, Lucrecia Martel was filmmaker-in-residence at the University of Cambridge, where she offered a sequence of seminars on her filmmaking practice to students, staff, and the university community.

Also in 2018, Lucrecia Martel was approached by Marvel Studios to direct Black Widow, but declined because she wanted to be able to direct her own action scenes.

In May 2019, Lucrecia Martel directed Icelandic singer Bjork in Cornucopia, a theatrical concert production at The Shed, an arts center in Manhattan.

Lucrecia Martel was a member of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival Feature Films Jury, alongside Wong Kar-wai, Helena Bonham Carter, and Samuel L Jackson.

In February 2016, while editing Zama, Lucrecia Martel was diagnosed with uterine cancer.

Lucrecia Martel stated that her illness caused a delay in the film's post-production but ultimately catalyzed its completion.

Lucrecia Martel came out to her family before the 2001 premiere of La Cienaga because she was worried about their reaction to the implicit homosexuality depicted in the film.

Lucrecia Martel's mother responded well and said she had known it since Martel was seven years old.

Lucrecia Martel is in a relationship with singer Julieta Laso, former lead vocalist of the Fernandez Fierro Orchestra.