Zama (film)
2016 film by Lucrecia Martel
Zama [ˈsama] is a 2017 period drama film written and directed by Lucrecia Martel, based on the 1956 novel of the same name by Antonio di Benedetto. It premiered at the 74th Venice International Film Festival. It was also screened in the Masters section at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. On 29 September 2017, the Argentine Academy of Cinematography Arts and Sciences chose the film as the national entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th Academy Awards and Best Iberoamerican Film at the 32nd Goya Awards.
In 2022, it was selected as the 19th greatest film of Argentine cinema in a poll organized in 2022 by the specialized magazines La vida útil, Taipei and La tierra quema, which was presented at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival.
Plot
In the late 18th century Don Diego de Zama is a magistrate in a remote outpost in Argentina. His wife and children are far away and he longs to be assigned to a post in Lerma, a change he believes is imminent.
The town is plagued by rumours of the feats of Vicuña Porto, a man who robs and rapes at will and who others are always claiming to have met and defeated. Uninterested by the gossip, Zama spends his time trying to seduce the wealthy, married Spanish noblewoman Luciana Piñares de Luenga, who rebuffs him. At work, he comes into conflict with an assistant magistrate, Ventura Prieto, when the latter objects to the enslavement of indigenous people.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Zama (film)” as 2016 film by Lucrecia Martel. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 2016 film by Lucrecia Martel. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q22931120. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2017, 1956 and 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “Zama (film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.