She's an art-house giant. But Lucrecia Martel sometimes feels the lure of Hollywood

This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

On one of her previous visits to Los Angeles, Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel found herself having a smoke on Hollywood Boulevard.There, while she stepped over the famous concrete-embedded stars, an unhoused man struck up a conversation with her.“He kept explaining to me that he was poorly dressed because he was currently living on the street after someone robbed him, but he had written a screenplay,” Martel, 59, recalls in Spanish over coffee on a morning in April at a West Hollywood hotel.“He told me they had stolen a watch from him — not a Rolex but a known brand,” she continues.“The whole time he was trying to convince me he was a millionaire who just so happened to be on the street because of random circumstances.”One of Latin America’s most indispensable storytellers, Martel is fascinated by how prevalent that dream still is in L.A.

— that movies can change your life overnight.“That particular fantasy is par for the course in this city,” she says, though she’s not above it.It’s the reason she’s back to promote her first documentary, “Our Land,” out Friday.Unhurried when it comes to her output, Martel has only made four fiction features, among them 2001’s “La Cienaga” and 2008’s “The Headless Woman” (returning to theaters this month in a new 4K restoration).

Her biting and formally audacious narratives examine class, politics and — a speciality — the interiority of women through enigmatic portraits of psychologically complex individuals.“Our Land,” a piercing indictment of the enduring wounds of colonialism, chronicles the murder of Indigenous Argentine activist Javier Chocobar in 2009 and the prolonged trial of the perpetrators in 2018.Chocobar was shot during a confrontation with armed men over land in the Tucumán province of Argentina where the Chuschagasta Indigenous community has lived for many generations.Mar...