La Ciénaga

La Ciénaga

Criterion Collection Edition #743

Directed by Lucrecia Martel • 2001 • Argentina
Starring Martín Adjemián, Diego Baenas, Leonora Balcarce

The release of Lucrecia Martel’s LA CIÉNAGA heralded the arrival of an astonishingly vital and original voice in Argentine cinema. With a radical and disturbing take on narrative, beautiful cinematography, and a highly sophisticated use of on- and offscreen sound, Martel turns her tale of a dissolute bourgeois extended family, whiling away the hours of one sweaty, sticky summer, into a cinematic marvel. This visceral take on class, nature, sexuality, and the ways that political turmoil and social stagnation can manifest in human relationships is a drama of extraordinary tactility, and one of the great contemporary film debuts.

La Ciénaga
  • La Ciénaga

    Directed by Lucrecia Martel • 2001 • Argentina, Spain
    Starring Martín Adjemián, Diego Baenas, Leonora Balcarce

    The release of Lucrecia Martel’s LA CIÉNAGA heralded the arrival of an astonishingly vital and original voice in Argentine cinema. With a radical and disturbing take on narrative, beaut...

Extras

  • Lucrecia Martel on LA CIÉNAGA

    In this piece, produced in the fall of 2014, LA CIÉNAGA director Lucrecia Martel examines her inspirations and approach to cinema.

  • Visual Strategies in LA CIÉNAGA

    From the very first shot of her very first feature, LA CIÉNAGA, Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel laid claim to a distinctive, defiantly strange cinematic syntax unlike any other. In this edition of Observations on Film Art, Professor Kristin Thompson examines the surprising choices—uncomfortably ...

  • Barry Jenkins on LA CIÉNAGA

  • Andrés Di Tella on LA CIÉNAGA

    In this interview, conducted in April 2014, director, writer, and Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema founder Andrés Di Tella examines the cultural context from which filmmaker Lucrecia Martel emerged, and analyzes her groundbreaking first feature.