No sophomore slump for Lucretia Martel whose second feature THE HOLY GIRL is guaranteed to appear on many critics best- of-the-year list worldwide. As in her immensely promising debut, LA CIENAGA (THE SWAMP), screened at HFFF in 2001, THE HOLY GIRL is set in a crumbling middle-class region of Northern Argentina where the director grew up. Martel's subject is the confusion of the sacred and the profane in both erotic and religious life. When a married doctor gropes 15-year-old Amalia (Maria Alche) on the street, she takes his action and her excitement as a sign from God that she has been chosen to save him. Alche and Mercedes Moran, as her divorced mother who has her own interest in the doctor, are superb. THE HOLY GIRL is the work of a filmmaker bent on remaking traditional cinematic language to reflect the interaction of the mind and the senses and to discover, amid the fragments and chaos of everyday life, if not evidence of the Divine Plan, then at least the possibility of a perfect form. (Amy Taubin)

Writer/Director: Lucrecia Martel
Producer: Lita Stantic

Lucrecia Martel was born in Salta, Northern Argentina, in 1966. In 1986 she moved to Buenos Aires to study communication. She made a few short films, among them REY MUERTO (DEAD KING), which received several international awards. Between 1995-1998 she directed widely acclaimed documentaries for television and children's programs with a dark sense of humor. In 1999 she received the Sundance+-/ NHK Filmmakers Award for her script LA CIENAGA (THE SWAMP) about families in Northern Argentina.