Lucrecia Martel and the New Argentine Cinema

Our release of the spellbinding La Ciénaga marks not only the brilliant Lucrecia Martel’s entrance into the Criterion Collection but also our first title from the New Argentine Cinema. To get a better idea of the importance and finer aesthetic points of that movement—which exploded in the late 1990s and early 2000s with films by the likes of Pablo Trapero, Martín Rejtman, and, of course, Martel—we turned to Andrés Di Tella, director, writer, and founder of the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema. In this excerpt from our interview with him, Di Tella discusses the idiosyncratic realism of the filmmakers of the New Argentine Cinema, and Martel’s singular approach to cinematic space and language.