One of contemporary cinema’s most revered auteurs, Argentina’s great Lucrecia Martel makes her long-awaited return with this singularly dreamlike voyage into the outer limits of historical fiction.

Adapted from Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 Argentinean novel, the first film in nine years from Lucrecia Martel (The Headless Woman; The Holy Girl, MIFF 2004) centres on Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), an 18th-century Spanish magistrate marooned in a far-flung South American outpost where he’s losing touch with civilisation and sanity.

Zama’s tropical mission to find a possibly fictional outlaw sends the film into a mythical, hallucinatory landscape, where Martel crafts an intoxicating mixture of absurdism and paranoia that folds the atmosphere of early Herzog into her own unforgettably disorienting vision.

Winner of the WorldView New Genre Development Award at Rotterdam.

"Beautiful, hypnotic, mysterious and elliptical, Zama is a story about a man at odds with a world that he struggles to dominate, which becomes a lacerating, often surprisingly comic evisceration of colonialism and patriarchy." – The New York Times

As part of The Bigger Picture program, enjoy a short introduction by Joe Hughes from The University of Melbourne – MIFF Learning Partner.