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The Politics of Art Cinema: Lucrecia Martel and Claudia Llosa

This paper looks at the contemporary construction of the female world cinema auteur, taking as my primary examples Argentine director Lucrecia Martel and Peruvian director Claudia Llosa. Martel’s The Headless Woman was featured in the 2008 competition at Cannes and Llosa’s Milk of Sorrow/La teta asustada won Berlin’s Golden Bear in 2009. Martel has been celebrated for the distinctive sounds and images deployed in elliptical narrations of the desires and disavowals of extended middle-class provincial families. Llosa’s authorship is marked by a bold visual vocabulary, magic realism, and provocative metaphors of indigenous female embodiment. The paper explores aesthetic articulations of national identity and femininity that are shaped by transnational film flows as much as by an imagined “authentic” national culture or by feminist legacies and politics.