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The Holy Girl

La niña santa

Argentina, Netherlands, Italy, Spain

2004

106 Min
Color
1.85:1
Spanish
  • Currently 3.9/5 Stars.
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DIR Lucrecia Martel

EXEC Pedro Almodóvar, Esther García

PROD Lita Stantic

SCR Lucrecia Martel, Juan Pablo Domenech

DP Félix Monti

CAST María Alche, Mercedes Morán, Carlos Belloso, Julieta Zylberberg, Alejandro Urdapilleta, Mía Maestro, Marta Lubos, Arturo Goetz, Alejo Mango, Mónica Villa, Leandro Stivelman

ED Santiago Ricci

MUSIC Andres Gerszenzon

SOUND Guido Berenblum, Marcos De Aguirre, David Miranda, Victor Alejandro Tendler

Cannes (In Competition), New York, Toronto, London, Locarno, São Paulo: Critics Award - Honorable Mention, Rotterdam (Sturm und Drang), Karlovy Vary (Horizons), San Francisco

Synopsis

ENT physicians gather at a provincial hotel in Salta. The hotel owner, Helena, is subdued, brittle, avoiding the calls of her ex-husband’s pregnant wife. Family dysfunction seems everywhere. Helena’s daughter, Amalia, about 14, discusses vocations in a Catholic girls group. Their teen imaginations conflate the erotic, the religious, and the lurid. Amalia notices Dr. Jano, and he notices her. She decides to make him her vocation, she follows him, he rubs against her in a public crowd, he’s appalled at his actions. Meanwhile, Helena believes Jano is attracted to her even through he’s married. Longing, guilt, scandal, and teen sensuality are set to collide. —IMDb

Director

Original

Lucrecia Martel

Lucrecia Martel was born in Salta, northern Argentina, in 1966. As a teenager she did a good deal of filming of her large family, but she never suspected she would end up studying filmmaking. 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 documentaries for television and children’s programs with a dark sense of humor and which were widely acclaimed by the Argentine press. In 1999 she received the Sundance+-/ NHK Filmmakers Award for her script La Cienaga (The Swamp) about families in Northern Argentina. —Filmbug

Interview with Lucrecia Martel 

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Picture of Staralfur

Staralfur

9Apr12

One of the best Latin-American films of the decade. It's powerful depiction of fanaticism and adolescence will be rewarded in the coming years.

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Langston Young

13May11

No sophomore jinx here, accomplished 2nd feature.

Picture of Lucas Granero

Lucas Granero

2Apr11

Majestuosa y delicada como una pieza de museo, "La Niña Santa" quizás peque de un cierto preciosismo de vitrina que parece atentar contra su salud, pero es en algunos pequeños rasgos de suciedad (rasgos que son la clave del cine de Lucrecia), donde se puede la magnitud de una obra cuya resonancia se acrecienta con los años. Una estatua a punto de estallar.

Eric Dupont likes this

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Slowart

29Sep10

lucrecia is always so refined and groundbreaking, that even with nina santa, her minor work, she is irreplaceable, she is the best living director working with sound, has her own distinctive themes, which become clearer with every film she makes, i like the milieu she's showing, the way her characters communicate,frames in form of tableaus, and especially the restrained suspense of her stories + swimming pools

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Articles

Our roundup of essays and articles on this film.
W184

The Auteurs Daily: Three Husbands and One Headless Woman

By David Hudson on August 19, 2009

"Like my other films, The Headless Woman doesn't end in the moment that the lights go up, it ends one or two days later," Lucrecia Martel

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Reviews

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Oh, You Bad Girl

By Glemaud on January 4, 2010

After the first act I was ready to write this off as a film to grand in scope to ever be concise and worthwhile. However, it wasn’t frustrating enough to turn off, so I powered through. Once I let…  read review

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Let's Discuss Martel's The Holy Girl

10 posts by 4 people about 2 years ago