Director Lucrecia Martel (Zama, La mujer sin cabeza) will be the president of the International Jury of the Competition at the 76th Venice International Film Festival (August 28 – September 7, 2019), which will assign the Golden Lion for Best Film, as well as other official awards.

Lucrecia Martel said: “It’s an honor, a responsibility, and a pleasure to be a part of this celebration of cinema, of humanity’s immense desire to understand itself.”

Alberto Barbera, Director of the Venice Film Festival, commented that “Four feature films and a handful of shorts, in just under two decades, have been enough to make Lucrecia Martel Latin America’s most important female director, and one of the top worldwide. In her films, the originality of her stylistic research and her meticulous mise-en-scène are at the service of a worldview free of compromises, dedicated to exploring the mysteries of female sexuality and the dynamics of groups and classes. We are grateful to her for having enthusiastically agreed to put her exacting, yet anything but uncharitable, gaze at the service of this commitment we have requested of her.”

Born in Salta, Argentina, Lucrecia Martel made her debut with the feature film LA CIÉNAGA (The Swamp) in 2001, followed by LA NIÑA SANTA (The Holy Girl) in 2004, and LA MUJER SIN CABEZA (The Headless Woman) in 2008. Her fourth feature, ZAMA (2017), an exploration of colonialism and racism in Latin America, had its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival.

Retrospectives of her work have been screened at many art and cultural institutions, such as Harvard, MoMA, Lincoln Center, Cambridge, and London’s Tate Museum, together with a series of master-classes about sound and narrative that the filmmaker has taught around the world.

In parallel, Martel has also shown an interest in other artistic languages outside cinema. Her latest collaboration was with Björk, for whom she directed the CORNUCOPIA concert at The Shed, acknowledged as the Icelandic artist’s most sophisticated show to date.