A Common Destiny, Lucrecia Martel

This book compiles a series of public talks by Argentine director Lucrecia Martel. Across ten lectures and classes, delivered between 2009 and 2025 at institutions and festivals in Argentina, Spain, and Uruguay, and transcribed here for the first time, Martel shares the resources that activate her cinema and her unique relationship with sound, while also broadening her perspective on the historical and current tensions of narrative.

Her talks offer a free-ranging exploration of some unsettling questions. How can we sensitively engage with what is happening in our territories? How do we recover dialogue with those who think differently? What narrative strategies are desirable in the face of algorithmic and platform standardization? Without offering categorical or solemn answers, Martel suggests tools for collectively experimenting with other ways of inhabiting the present and future. The book, organized into three sections, also includes exchanges with Argentine filmmaker and writer César González, Spanish director Carla Simón, and journalist Leila Guerriero, in which counterpoints regarding artistic creation emerge. The constant aim is to converse as a way to mend community and build a possible space for thinking with others.

A Common Destiny is not about her films, but rather draws on her filmmaking practice to propose new discussions in the cultural sphere. In times of closed discourses and predictable authoritarian gestures, the voice of the director of The Swamp and Our Land is striking for its frankness and provocative stance, willing to review past mistakes, confront the despondency of the present, and encourage future generations to invent what does not yet exist.