General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Zama (2017 film)

Zama is a 2017 Spanish-language drama film directed by Lucrecia Martel, adapted from Antonio Di Benedetto's 1956 novel of the same name. It follows Don Diego de Zama, a magistrate of the Spanish Crown born in South America, who waits in a late-18th-century colonial outpost in what is now Paraguay for a letter from the King granting him a transfer that never arrives.¹^•² Premiering at the 2017 Venice Film Festival, it was Martel's fourth feature and her first in nine years, following The Headless Woman (2008).¹^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director and source	Written and directed by Lucrecia Martel, adapted from Antonio Di Benedetto's 1956 novel Zama¹
Premiere	1 September 2017, Venice Film Festival (Sala Perla 2)¹
Runtime and language	115 minutes; Spanish, with Qom, Pilagá and Mbyá Guaraní also spoken¹^•⁴
Lead cast	Daniel Giménez Cacho (Don Diego de Zama), Lola Dueñas (Luciana Piñares de Luenga), Matheus Nachtergaele, Juan Minujín, Mariana Nunes, Rafael Spregelburd¹
Key crew	Cinematography Rui Poças; editing Miguel Schverdfinger and Karen Harley; sound Guido Berenblum and Emmanuel Croset¹
Reception	96% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (113 reviews) against a 58% audience score; US gross of $200.2K⁵
Honors	KNF Award at International Film Festival Rotterdam 2018; Goya Award nomination 2018 for Best Iberoamerican Film; ranked =196 in the 2022 Sight and Sound Greatest Films critics' poll⁶^•⁷^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot

Don Diego de Zama is an officer of the Spanish Crown born in South America, stationed in a remote colonial town. He waits for a letter from the King granting him a transfer to a better place, and must ensure that nothing overshadows that prospect. He is forced to accept submissively every task entrusted to him by successive Governors, who come and go while he stays behind. The years pass and the letter never arrives. When Zama realizes everything is lost, he joins a party of soldiers pursuing a dangerous bandit.¹

The character is an "americano", born in the Americas rather than in Spain, and his social standing leads him to disdain his local environment.⁹ He is first seen on a beach looking out to sea rather than facing his responsibilities on land, and an early scene in which he slaps an indigenous woman who chases him away establishes the arrogant sense of entitlement that pervades his behavior.⁹ His hoped-for destination is a matter Martel changed from the novel: where Di Benedetto's Zama waits for Buenos Aires, the film's Zama hopes for Lerma, in the province of Salta.¹⁰

Adaptation and firsts

Zama marked several departures in Martel's career. It was her first literary adaptation, her first period piece, her first film with a male protagonist, and her first feature not set in her native Salta.¹¹^•¹⁰ Her first three features, all set in Salta, examined a stagnant middle class against the backdrop of Argentina's recent history; Zama instead turns to the colonial past.⁹

The adaptation alters the source in several ways. Di Benedetto's novel is structured in three parts corresponding to the years 1790, 1794 and 1799; Martel's film forgoes any on-screen mention of these dates, marking the passage of time elliptically, through changes of governor and the physical transformation of Zama's face and body.¹²^•¹³ She also conflated characters and changed the ending.¹⁴ In her director's statement, Martel wrote that the film "contains no historicist pretensions"; she sought to submerge the viewer in a world that "was devastated before it was ever encountered, and that therefore remains in delirium."¹

Production

The film is a large international co-production. The Venice festival program lists Argentina, Brazil, Spain, France, Mexico, the USA, the Netherlands and Portugal among the producing countries, and the Spanish-language academic record adds Lebanon and Switzerland to the list of financing sources.¹^•¹⁵ Production companies included Rei Cine (Argentina), Bananeira Filmes (Brazil) and El Deseo (Spain), the company of producer Pedro Almodóvar.⁶^•¹⁶ Screen Daily counted 16 co-production companies involved, including El Deseo and Canana.¹⁷

Style: image and sound

Martel's visual and sonic approach is central to the film's effect. Nearly every composition surprises with asymmetries and odd placements of figures, and the mise en scène is purposely disorienting.¹³ The soundtrack is a collage of Spanish dialects and indigenous languages, and the sound design is disorienting enough that the Los Angeles Times review notes conversations are occasionally overpowered by ambient sound.¹⁴^•³ The dialogue mixes Spanish with Qom, Pilagá and Mbyá Guaraní.⁴

An anachronistic musical choice stands out: the score draws on midcentury beach-pop recordings by Los Indios Tabajaras, sentimental Mexican exotica that reviewers read as a nod to the novel's 1956 publication date.²^•¹⁴ The indigenous characters' speech in the film draws on the history of the Guaycurú community, which Martel noted is now extinct in Argentina.¹⁸

Themes and critical reading

Critics have read the film as a critique of colonialism that avoids depicting the moment of conquest itself. The Guardian's review describes it as an exposé of Eurocentrism, interested in "the traces of colonial violence" visible in the behavior of the film's indigenous characters, and calls Martel's gaze "a vivid, drily funny act of decolonisation."² Americas Quarterly reads an early image of a water-averse fish fighting to stay alive as an analogy for the protagonist's precarious position, and the film more broadly as an allegory for the perils of Latin America's colonization.³

Scholarly readings have emphasized the film's treatment of time and history. One analysis argues that Martel uses montage to denarrativize and demonumentalize the conventional narrative of history, opening a relationship with the past freed from historicist logic.¹⁹ Another notes that the film replaces linear progress with a circular, repetitive time closer to Indigenous Andean conceptions of temporality, while the edges of the frame carry a multitude of Indigenous and enslaved Black people around the supposedly powerful protagonist.²⁰ A study of the film's sensory dimension, read alongside Walter Benjamin's "On the Concept of History" and "Naples", argues that the film blurs social hierarchies through sexual mores that traverse stratifications, and positions slaves, mulattos, mestizos and indigenous people as dominant presences over European or Creole fragility.²¹

Reception

The film premiered at Venice on 1 September 2017 and went on to screen at Toronto, New York and London in 2017 and Rotterdam in 2018.²² It won the KNF Award at International Film Festival Rotterdam 2018 and a Jury Mention at the Seville European Film Festival, was selected by the Argentine Film Academy to compete for the Oscar nomination for best non-English-language film, and was nominated for the 2018 Goya Award for best Iberoamerican film.⁶^•²³ At Argentina's Premios Sur it won best film, director, actor (Daniel Giménez Cacho), editing, adapted screenplay, art direction, costume design, sound, cinematography, and makeup.²³

In the United States, Strand Releasing gave it a limited theatrical release on April 13, 2018, grossing $200.2K.⁵ Critical response was strongly positive: the Tomatometer stood at 96% from 113 reviews, while the audience Popcornmeter registered 58%, a gap reviewers themselves noted, describing a film that "enchanted nearly all critics and sharply divided audiences."⁵ In 2022 the film ranked joint 196th in the Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time critics' poll.⁸

References

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