Lucrecia Martel’s films always reward patience. Her first feature-length documentary, Our Land, is no exception. As the Argentinean filmmaker zooms in from her opening shots in space, her camera focuses on a murder trial that brings up long-overdue questions about Indigenous rights, their systemic oppression, and the exploitation they face at the hands of both colonial powers and modern-day bureaucracy. It’s a film about the country’s history, and how acts of violence—both bloody and those on paper—have taken their toll on Indigenous populations the world over. Since her first film, La Ciénaga, where children witness the way people in different classes move in their social spaces, Martel has probed her country’s shortcomings, leaving audiences to sit and examine their own feelings about what they’ve learned.
One of Latin America’s most celebrated directors, Martel has long been interested in exploring the history of Argentina, its politics, and its disparities. After about a decade making shorts and TV programs, she broke out in 2001 with La Ciénaga, which is about an upper-middle class family wasting away in the heat of summer in the crumbling vestiges of their family vacation home, while the kids get into troubles of their own. Both of her follow-up films, The Holy Girl and The Headless Woman—the latter of which is also enjoying a 4K re-release alongside Our Land—center on female characters behaving badly, both entitled and startled by a sudden change in their lives. They justify their reactions because of fear and sanctimony. Over a decade after that pair of films, Martel reemerged with her most ambitious project yet, the experimental period drama Zama, which followed a Spanish subject stuck on a mission he did not want to undertake, and is now unable to return home.
Now, almost a decade after Zama, Our Land, or Nuestra Tierra in its original Spanish, is another ambitious pivot, a nonfiction departure for a filmmaker known mostly for her thought-provoking class dramas. But Our Land is also an extension of that work, rooted in a sense of justice and a desire to highlight these disparities. Once back down on earth, Our Land follows the murder trial of three men—a land owner and two former policemen—accused of killing Javier Chocobar, a member of the Chuschagasta tribe, who tried protecting his land from speculators. Shot in front of his family and neighbors, Chocobar’s death shook a community long under siege from centuries of exploitation from Spanish colonizers and their descendants. The case became a lightning rod moment: Prosecutors and defendants argued over the legality of Indigenous land theft, and even if Chuschagasta still exist as a tribe, while their members sit somberly in the courtroom.
Through these legal testimonies, Martel first shows the defendants’ side of the story as they justify their fears and murderous actions. The footage is much more static than her fiction films, but they are just as claustrophobic as the well-mannered homes in The Headless Woman and The Holy Girl, where polite society melts away and reveals something more morally questionable at the core. Her camera eventually wanders over to the gallery, to the grief-stricken faces speaking up for their slain loved one. Their stories, told outside of court in voiceover, fill in the backstory to Chocobar’s life and the area he called home. Family photographs bring up rosy memories, adding a personal touch to the cold, clinical trial and the drone footage giving audiences a god’s-eye-view of the contested terrain.
All of this makes Our Land a fascinating new chapter in a renowned director’s work. While the shots in the courtroom may be less experimental, Martel slowly evolves the look and appearance of the drone photography surveying the Chuschagasta territory from above, at one point even playfully filming it upside down. While the trial is told in chronological order, she shifts backwards in time for family stories and history, mirroring Zama‘s unexpected structure. Like in her first three feature films, Martel allows the defendants in the trial to talk for long stretches of time, revealing their true nature to the audience. With outside videos and interviews, Martel also documents one of the more chilling conversations in the trial: the argument over whether or not the Chuschagasta became extinct centuries ago, which the cited historian in the case admits was something he only wrote for dramatic purposes.
While Our Land slowly unveils the different levels to this case, there’s still an unmistakable sense of injustice, anger, and grief. As the film’s new ending—updated from its festival version—reveals, some justice has been served for the Chuschagasta community, but its fight for recognition and restitution still continues. Their struggle is just one of many efforts to recover from generations of colonialism, battling a system that was not built to acknowledge their communities, let alone give them justice. For Martel, branching out to nonfiction filmmaking covers both new ground but also familiar territory, expanding the perspective of her work and strengthening her advocacy for a better Argentina.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.