52 Films by Women Vol 3. 28. ZAMA (Director: Lucrecia Martel)
The first time I attended a screening of Zama , Argentine writer-director Lucrecia Martel’s fourth feature, I ‘watched’ it – it unspooled in front of my eyes – but I didn’t see it. It was October 2017. Less than 24 hours earlier in the same venue, the Odeon Leicester Square in Central London, I had seen – and was blown away by – Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird . After a great movie, you don’t necessarily want to go back to the cinema straight away, even if it is the London Film Festival. You want to pat your belly and say, ‘I’m stuffed – please, no more’. Seven months later, I finally ‘saw’ Zama , with a post-screening question and answer session with Martel. It is fair to say that she doesn’t sell her films, well, this one in particular, encouraging the viewer instead to swallow it like an exotic drink that they might otherwise refuse. I was thoroughly absorbed – nay, wowed – by the movie, a near comedy about hope, despair and indifference to colonization. In many ways it is radical ...