The film stars an ensemble cast featuring Graciela Borges, Mercedes Morán, Martín Adjemián and Daniel Valenzuela.

The film is set in the high plains of northwestern Argentina and portrays the life of a self-pitying Argentine bourgeois family.

[2] To escape the heat, Mecha, a middle-aged woman, spends summers at their decaying country estate, La Mandrágora, with her husband, Gregorio, and their children.

While Mecha is recovering from her injuries, her family watches news reports about local Argentines seeing apparitions of the Virgin Mary on rooftops.

At a nearby dance club, Mecha's son José gets into a fight with Isabel's boyfriend and returns home injured.

[3] The jury suggested she rewrite the script to follow a more traditional structure around one or two protagonists, but she chose to retain its diffuse nature.

It's the kind of film where you can't tell what's going to happen, and I wanted the audience to be very uncomfortable from the beginning.

"[6] To find the child actors for the film, Martel held 2,400 auditions, 1,600 of which she recorded on video in a garage near her home in Salta, Argentina.

Of casting Mecha and Tali, Martel said: "in Salta I didn't find what I was looking for and, instead, I saw a television programme showed to me by a woman friend who knew what I was looking for.

But I saw her at some point in a magazine in some photographs they had taken of her with her daughter, on holiday, and there, away from the character in Gasoleros, I realized she was the only one for my film, as Lita Stantic had already suggested.

The site's consensus reads: "Dense yet impressively focused, La Cienaga is a disquieting look at domestic dissatisfaction - and a powerful calling card for debuting writer-director Lucrecia Martel.

"[10] Critic David Lipfert also liked Martel's various sociological messages and metaphors, and said he believed the "New Argentina Cinema" was moving beyond the themes related to the military dictatorship period of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

He wrote: "[Martel's] intense, in-your-face portrait of a dissolute middle class lacks the usual justifying criminal context.

"[11] When the film opened in New York City, Amy Taubin of The Village Voice wrote: "Martel's La ciénaga is a veritable Chekhov tragicomedy of provincial life.