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THE HOLY GIRL
Fifteen-year-old Amalia lives with her divorced mother in a dilapidated spa hotel. When a medical convention is hosted there, she meets Dr. Jano, a married man to whom her mother is attracted. The doctor is sexually interested in minors. While in a crowd, he presses his behind against the girl without knowing whose daughter she is. Brought up in a religious environment, Amalia sees it as her (not entirely unselfish) mission to save Dr. Jano's soul. In Martel's second feature film, awakening sexuality and spirituality, harassment and desire, innocence and experience combine to form a fatal cocktail of uncontrollable emotions. The gloomy close-ups, powerful looks, and indirect insinuations tell of a desire that all the characters have in common and that Martel skillfully presents. In this film, good and evil turn out to be a matter of one's perspective.
Courtesy of Austrian Filmmuseum.
Meet the director
Lucrecia Martel
Lucrecia Martel was born in Salta, northern Argentina, in 1966. As a teenager, she often made home movies of her large family. In 1986, Martel moved to Buenos Aires in order to study journalism and later film at the Avellaneda Experimental (AVEX) and the Escuela Nacional de Experimentación y Realización Cinematográfica (ENERC). Following a number of short films, including REY MUERTO (1995), which received awards at numerous international festivals, she began to make documentaries for television. For LA CIÉNAGA (2001), she received the Sundance Filmmakers' Award for her screenplay as well as the Alfred Bauer Award for best debut film at the Berlinale in 2001. Her works also include LA NIÑA SANTA (2004), LA MUJER SIN CABEZA (2008), and ZAMA (2017), all of which she not only directed but also wrote the screenplay for. Her films have been shown at festivals in Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Toronto, New York, Rotterdam, and at Sundance. Film festivals as well as such institutions as Harvard University, UCLA Berkeley, London's Tate Museum, and the Lincoln Center in New York have shown retrospectives of her work. Martel is one of the most important female filmmakers in Latin America.