[5] Her 2001 debut feature film La Ciénaga (The Swamp), about an indulgent bourgeois extended family spending the summertime in a decrepit vacation home in provincial Salta, Argentina, was internationally highly acclaimed upon release and introduced a new and vital voice to Argentine cinema.

[6][7][8][9][10] David Oubiña called it "one of the highest achievements" of the New Argentine Cinema, a wave of contemporary filmmaking that began in the mid-1990s in reaction to decades of political and economic crises in the country.

Her father, mother, and maternal grandmother Nicolasa were "very good storytellers" and would tell her and her six siblings "lots of stories" to keep them quiet in bed while the adults took their afternoon siesta.

She was especially fascinated by the way her grandmother used different sounds, tones, and carefully selected pauses to establish "atmosphere" in her scary, fantastical stories.

"As a child," Martel says, "and even today, I have always been captivated by the form not only of stories and storytelling, but also of conversation and the way people pause and leave space for someone to intervene.

Impressed with the film's women creators and mainstream success, Martel says that as a result of the viewing she "thought the cinema was a woman's job", a "confusion", as she describes it, that "stayed with [her]" for years.

"Suffer[ing] uncertainty" and trying to decide "what to study or do with [her] life",[15] she farmed pigs that year, too—breeding, raising, and selling them—and even considered making it her future livelihood.

Feeling uncomfortable, she decided to distance herself from the faith and leave the school to pursue the new communication sciences degree program at the University of Buenos Aires.

Not wanting to neglect her interests in the technical and the creative, while at the University of Buenos Aires she enrolled in a nighttime animation course at the Film Art Institute of Avellaneda (IDAC) located about 5.5 miles away, which Martel describes was a significant commute at the time.

Since over 1,000 people signed up for the exam and only 30 vacancies existed at the school, applicants were required to take a "huge qualifying course", which Martel says she spent months preparing for.

"[22] Another short film Martel directed as a student is La otra ("The Other", 1990), a documentary about a man who talks about the joys and sorrows of his life as a transvestite as he dresses up as a woman to sing tangos at a nightclub.

[14][23] Next, Martel directed Besos rojos ("Red Kisses", 1991), a short film based on a real-life police case between three lovers caught in a love triangle.

Rey muerto was exhibited in Argentina as part of a larger omnibus film called Historias breves ("Short Stories", 1995).

In The Holy Girl (La niña santa), it is a doctor who arrives in a town and stays in a hotel where the owner lives with her teenage daughter, a student of a religious school.

In The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza), it is an accident on a deserted route and a family cover-up to hide guilt and tragedy."

"Martel's filmic trilogy about life in the province of Salta, Argentina," writes film scholar Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez, "explores the country's incomplete transition to democracy from the perspective of strong, intelligent, and socially privileged female protagonists who do not conform to dominant patriarchal values: first during childhood in La Ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001), then during sexual awakening in La niña santa (The Holy Girl, 2004); and finally in adulthood, in La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman, 2008)"...Martel's work is finely tuned to the particular rhythms and values of provincial middle-class Argentina, a world whose economic stagnation and moral bankruptcy she dissects through narratives that play on viewers' sympathies by constantly shifting between favorable and unfavorable perspectives on her characters.

"[34] Filmmaker magazine wrote, "[Martel's] debut feature La Ciénaga premiered at Sundance, won the Alfred Bauer Award at Berlin, and received rave reviews wherever it played.

"[17] Film scholar Paul Julian Smith wrote that although "Martel has had to rely rather on a cocktail of small, mainly European, production companies" to fund her films, "industrial constraints and transnational flow have not compromised [her] artistic individuality...[Her] severe art movie aesthetics identify her with other transnational auteurs favoured on the festival circuit.

"[2] La Ciénaga received numerous international awards,[35] and The Holy Girl and The Headless Woman were nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festivals of 2004 and 2008, respectively.

Many scholars have written extensively regarding the films' critiques of gender and sexuality, as well as its bold depictions of class, race, nationality, and colonialism.

Film scholar Deborah Shaw argues that the trilogy "presents an anatomy of Argentine, bourgeois female identity" and "explores the micropolitics of gender, sexuality and location, rather than national narratives of oppression and collective liberation".

Yet to date no one volume has set out to provide a comprehensive view of Martel’s work (whether in fiction, documentary or essayistic short film) and of the range of critical responses it can generate.

The chapters in this collection are authored by some of the most prominent scholars of Martel’s films and by emergent voices, and offer a fresh set of perspectives (alongside two translations of landmark essays not previously available in English) that build on existing critical trends and suggest promising new avenues for research.”[6] In May 2008, Martel was reported as slated to direct the film adaptation of The Eternaut, the very popular Argentine science fiction comic strip created by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López in 1957 about a toxic snowfall and alien invasion of Buenos Aires.

[45][46] In July 2011, Martel's short film Muta ("Mutate") premiered at an invitation-only event in Beverly Hills attended by stars like Emma Roberts, Hailee Steinfeld, Ashley Tisdale, Cat Deeley, Diane Kruger, Jeremy Renner, and Marilyn Manson.

Directed and co-written by Martel, the film depicts a luxury modernist ghost ship haunted by faceless, insect-like female creatures attempting to rid themselves of the only man trying to get on board.

[51] It was distributed as part of the anthology documentary film El aula vacía ("The Empty Classroom", 2015), in which eleven award-winning directors examine the underlying reasons why nearly one out of every two Latin American students never graduates high school.

An adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto's 1956 novel of the same name, it narrates the tragic story of Don Diego de Zama, a Spanish colonial functionary stationed in Asunción, Paraguay who waits, in vain, for his superiors to authorize his return home to his wife and family.

It was an international co-production among eight countries: Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, France, the U.S., the Netherlands, and Portugal, with stars like Pedro Almodóvar, Gael García Bernal, and Danny Glover among its long list of producers.

For Gatopardo, Mónica Yemayel wrote "Like the other characters of Lucrecia Martel, only now in the late 18th century, Diego de Zama is unable to take charge of his own life; his fate is left in the hands of others.

She's too good a director to be sat on the sidelines for long and Zama may just be her left-field masterpiece; a picture that's antic, sensual and strange, with a top-note of menace and a malarial air.