Martel’s films are distilled through separate instances of pretence, disguise, subterfuge, denial, masquerade and delusion. She uses these human tendencies to describe an Argentina ravaged by diverse traumas: a tryst with dictatorship, a colonial past, a history of violence. Martel has stated that her work is - much like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ - an accumulation of multiple layers and various realities. The present Retrospective exists therefore as a tribute to a body of work the denseness of whose commentary is entirely unique in the world.