North Terminal

During the 2020 lockdown, Lucrecia Martel returns to her home in Salta, Argentina’s most conservative region. Here she follows Julieta Laso who, like a muse, introduces her to a group of female artists and defiant people who exchange glances and opinions around a fire.

This might have done better for me if Lucrecia Martel had just stuck to putting together a series of authentic and potent folk performances from an array of people whom we meet, initially, sitting around a camp fire in the middle of lockdown. I didn't really need to hear Julieta Laso's rather chronological and self-indulgent in-car monologue. Back to the thrust of this documentary, though, and the acoustics - especially in the jungle, give the songs a joy and a potency and you get a real sense not just of tradition, but of aspiration from the (admittedly subtitled) lyric for women who yearn for an intangible yet necessary independence of body, opportunity and spirit. Not so much worth a watch, but certainly a listen.