La niña santa
Argentina,
2004, 106 min
Shown in 2005
CREDITS
- dir
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Lucrecia Martel
- prod
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Lita Stantic
- scr
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Lucrecia Martel
- cam
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Felix Monti
- editor
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Santiago Ricci
- mus
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Andres Gerszenzon
- cast
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Mercedes Morán, Carlos Belloso, Maria Alché, Alejandro Urdapilleta, Julieta Zylberberg
- source
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Fine Line Features, 888 Seventh Ave, New York, NY 10106. FAX: 212-956-1942. EMAIL: steven.raphael@newline.com.
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COMMENTS
Lucrecia Martel in person.
OTHER
“God sends us signs, that’s what matters,” notes a church choir teacher to her charges in Lucrecia Martel’s hallucinatory look at religious devotion and sexual awakening in small-town Argentina. For teenaged choir girl Amalia, however, God’s only sign is the ear, nose and throat doctor who just rubbed against her thigh. Caught between being devoted to God, just like her teachers tell her to be, and being devoted to the rather impious signals of her changing body, Amalia decides that the only way to Heaven is to save this poor doctor’s sinning soul. Seeking him out to the point of obsession (and even competing against her lonely divorced mother for his attention), Amalia wants to prove her piety by any means necessary. The Holy Girl locks down its blend of Lolita obsessions and Catholic repressions with a delirium-soaked visual and aural flair as memorable as any in recent cinema. The probing camera hovers barely inches away from each character, seemingly guarding them from any potential sin, while the soundtrack echoes with a satanic litany of half-heard conversations, overlapping sounds and odd industrial noises. “The Holy Girl is a film that defies categorization,” wrote A.O. Scott of the New York Times. “But I’m tempted to call it a miracle.”
FACTOID #177
In 2000 animator Faith Hubley was the recipient of the Persistence of Vision Award. One year later, her daughter Emily appeared at the Festival with her bandmates, Yo La Tengo, to perform a score accompanying the silent underwater films of Jean Painlevé.
