General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Martín

Martín, released as Martín (Hache), is a 1997 drama film directed by the Argentine filmmaker Adolfo Aristarain, a co-production of Spain (70 percent) and Argentina (30 percent). It follows Martín Echenique, an Argentine film director who has lived in Madrid for more than twenty years, and his 19-year-old son, also named Martín but known to everyone as Hache (the Spanish letter H, short for hijo, son), who comes to live with his father in Madrid after a nearly fatal drug overdose in Buenos Aires.¹^•² The film won the top awards at the Havana Film Festival and earned acting prizes for Federico Luppi, Cecilia Roth, and Eusebio Poncela.³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Adolfo Aristarain; screenplay by Aristarain and Kathy Saavedra⁴
Production	Spain 70 percent, Argentina 30 percent; produced by Tornasol Films and Adolfo Aristarain; distributed in Spain by Alta Films¹
Principal cast	Federico Luppi (Martín), Juan Diego Botto (Hache), Eusebio Poncela (Dante), Cecilia Roth (Alicia)²
Releases	Argentina 17 April 1997; Spain 26 September 1997⁵^•¹
Spanish box office	576,625 spectators and €2,085,404.10 in receipts¹
Major awards	Havana: best fiction feature, best direction, best actress; San Sebastián: Silver Shell for best actor (Luppi); Goya: best actress (Roth)³^•⁶
Rating in Spain	Not recommended for viewers under 18¹

Spoilers

Plot and characters

Martín Echenique is a successful Argentine film director who has lived in Madrid for more than twenty years and has not seen his son in five. Following a family tradition, the son carries the same first name, but everyone calls him Hache to tell him apart from his father. Hache, 19, lives in Buenos Aires with his mother, who has remarried and started a new family; he neither studies nor works, spending his time playing guitar in the street. After he barely survives a massive dose of drink and drugs, an episode his stepfather reads as a suicide attempt, his mother sends him to Madrid.²

In Madrid, Hache enters his father's circle: Alicia, Martín's much younger lover, and Dante, an actor and Martín's best friend. The four characters talk almost continuously, about life, love, fidelity, and drugs, while Martín, who does not allow himself to feel because the person who loves is exposed to pain, keeps everyone at a distance.⁷^•² The name itself carries the film's theme of identity: as the Argentine press noted at the release, Martín is not a proper name because it is the father's, and Hache is an absence of voice, so that the son risks being absorbed by the father.⁸

Production

The film was shot between 23 September 1996 and 30 November 1996, with 54 days of filming in Argentina.¹ The crew included the cinematographer Porfirio Enríquez, the editor Fernando Pardo, and the composer Fito Páez, the Argentine rock musician, who wrote the original score.⁴ Producers were Gerardo Herrero, Javier López Blanco, and Aristarain himself, through Tornasol Films.²

Aristarain later said the immediate trigger for the film was his concern at the time over his own son's education and his attempt to understand the hormonal and mental upheaval of an adolescent, although the film's protagonist is older.⁹ The film draws on semi-autobiographical elements and centers the tumultuous relationship between a father and his son.¹⁰

Release and reception

The film premiered in Argentina on 17 April 1997⁵ and competed in the official section of the 45th San Sebastián Festival in September 1997, where Federico Luppi won the Silver Shell for best actor.⁶ In Spain it opened on 26 September 1997, classified as not recommended for viewers under 18, and drew 576,625 spectators with receipts of €2,085,404.10.¹

Festival success. At the 19th Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana in December 1997, the film won the prizes for best fiction feature, best direction, and best female performance for Cecilia Roth; the newspaper El País called it the clear highlight of that year's edition.³ Further prizes followed: best actor for Eusebio Poncela at the Biarritz Latin American Film Festival, audience awards at the Oslo and Chicago Latino film festivals, and the Goya Award for best actress for Roth at the 1997 Spanish Academy awards, where the film was also nominated for best picture, best direction, and best sound.¹^•¹¹

Critical response was divided. The Spanish review site ACEprensa praised the film as a hard drama sustained by its four actors, citing Aristarain's adoption of John Ford's remark that stories are told through the faces of actors.¹² Other Spanish critics found the dialogue-heavy script pretentious, one calling it a cocktail of commonplaces.⁹ On audience aggregators the film has held steady regard: IMDb lists a 7.6/10 rating from about 5,200 users, and Rotten Tomatoes shows a 92 percent audience score.¹³^•¹⁴

Legacy

The film is regularly cited among Aristarain's key works alongside Tiempo de revancha (1981), Un lugar en el mundo (1992), and Roma (2004), and it stands at the center of his long partnership with the actor Federico Luppi.¹⁵ Scholars of contemporary Argentine cinema have read the film as a study of exile no longer tied to dictatorship but to economic crisis, with its characters voicing a lack of perspective on a viable future in their country.¹⁶ In Spain the film remains available on streaming services including Movistar Plus+ and FlixOlé.¹³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1990s › Drama films late 1990s › Released 1995 to 1998

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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