Gijón: Headless Woman leads Argentinean-European contingent
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Only a few days before its local release, Lucrecia Martel’s third feature, The Headless Woman, has screened out of competition at the 46th Gijón Film Festival. Previously seen in Cannes (see news), the film is without a doubt the most prominent of the three European-Argentinean co-productions at the festival this year.
The other two are Lisandro Alonso’s Calatan/Argentinean title Liverpool and Pablo Agüero’s feature debut Salamandra, a French/German/Argentinean project.
Already working on the script of her upcoming film El Enternauta, based on a comic book about an alien invasion of Buenos Aires, in Gijón the soft-spoken 42-year-old Martel talked of Pedro Almodóvar, whose company El Deseo co-produced The Headless Woman.
“I remember the first time I laughed like mad in a theatre was with one of his films,” admitted Martel. “Then I knew he had liked my first feature and we got in touch to work together on The Holy Girl. I was quite lucky because companies…with a strong personality behind them, like El Deseo, tend to be very open to auteur cinema and know better what to do to make it more visible to wider audiences”.
For Martel, this is a particularly tricky issue as “the concepts of diversity, difference and the alternative seem to strive against the market. The more hegemonic a plot is, the easier it is to commercialise it. My only hope is that this crisis everyone is talking about is going to be so deep that things can only get better afterwards. One usually emerges stronger from a crisis.” Perhaps no one had understood by watching her films, but Martel is actually an optimist.
The Headless Woman will be released in Spain this Friday by Warner Bros España.
Vitor Pinto Cineuropa.org