The newest movie by Lucrecia Martel (Bagno, Saint girl, a woman without a head) made on the basis of Antoni di Benedetta's novel, devoted - as the eminent Argentine writer and journalist Martín Caparrós, the author of Famine - to "the victims of expectations." The title character Diego de Zama is a manager residing on the outskirts of the eighteenth-century Spanish colony. He lives in a state of constant waiting for promotion, he wants to show up before the leaders and be noticed by them. Looking for the future, however, he does not see the value of what is happening around him. He is a prisoner of the office, a man who is persistently attached to rituals, looking at himself through the prism of his social position. Tropical heat and moisture quickly expose the emptiness of standards brought from Europe. The more desperate a hero sticks to the rigid rules that an official, a colonizer and a proud white man should follow in his mind, the more humiliation awaits him. By situating their story on the cultural borderland, where the representatives of the Spanish Crown are forced to uncertain coexistence with indigenous people, Lucrecia Martel gives Zama a chance for transformation and liberation. A chance that comes with a fall.

Małgorzata Sadowska

Awards
FF in Havana 2017 - the best film; Rotterdam IFF 2018 - KNF Award