La niña santa

La niña santa
The Holy Girl

“Lucrecia has had a very liberating effect on a lot of people, who have realized that one’s own story, told well, is enough; there’s no need to go searching elsewhere. In the intimate, in observation, in that ‘dead’ moment of the afternoon, the siesta, there’s so much.”

Julia Solomonoff1

 

“What interested me in this film - and also in La Ciénaga; it will probably interest me for the rest of my life - is that contradictory area between what is organic and perceptible, and moral laws, or laws in general, including language. Between these two bodies, one organic and one discontinuous, there are contradictions, and these underlie each character and situation in La niña santa. In this sense, the distinction between good and bad is totally pointless. Not the distinction between what is good and what is bad for us, which has much to do with the body and things organic, but moral ideas, good and bad, which turn out to be absurd.[…] What I enjoyed about writing this film was seeing how these moral issues worked as a trap for these very complex beings. It isn’t an attempt to judge their actions, but it simply observes these contradititons, without being judgemental.”

Lucrecia Martel2

 

“Each of Martel’s films constitues a meditation on perception and it’s social conditioning. Perceptual impediment and deprivation is associated with adult charactes, dominant subjectivities, and opressive attitudes. In this symbolic landscape, the established order is transgressed by the young girl’s enhanced perceptual capacity, her ability both to see the realities to which others are blind, and to move beyond the visual into other sensory epistemologies.”

Deborah Martin3

  • 1Deborah Martin, “Interview with Julia Solomonoff,” Auteuse theory: a blog on women’s cinema, April 16, 2012.
  • 2Jason Wood, Talking Movies: Contemporary World Filmmakers in Interview (London & New York: Wallflower Press, 2006).
  • 3Fiona Handyside, International Cinema and the Girl: Local Issues, Transnational Contexts (New York: Pallgrave Macmillan US, 2016).
screening
CINEMATEK, Brussels