Henry O'Brien
Early on in Lucrecia Martel’s first-ever documentary, Nuestra Tierra (English translation is Landmarks), premiering at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, a member of the Chuschagasta community describes the challenges and frustrations in trying to have a conversation with outsiders. In this exchange with the filmmaking crew, he opines on the effectiveness of trying to talk with these people: “Dialogue means we lose something.”
Lucrecia Martel takes this message to heart and develops a film that is one of the finest examples of using images as a form of Indigenous resistance. The legendary filmmaker known for La ciénaga and Zama tells a true crime story about the 2009 murder of Chuschagasta leader Javier Chocobar and the further attempts to have this northwestern Argentinian community erased. The film jumps back and forth between the 2018 trial of Chocobar’s killer, wealthy landowner Darío Luis Amín, and archival images of Chuschagasta people and history, and creates an at-times horrifying and upsetting experience, while still emphasizing the need to tell one’s story and fight back.
Nuestra Tierra begins with the table setting to give the viewers a sense of the Chuschagasta community before immediately showing the grainy footage of Chocobar’s murder. We never really see the actual gunshot itself; it’s too blurry to get a clear image. However, the sounds of gunshots and shrieks of terror speak volumes and send shivers down one’s spine.
The rest of the film takes on further sinister undertones, as the defense essentially uses Indigenous erasure as a legal strategy. The various defense attorneys continually question how long the Chuschagasta have been on their land and how definite a culture and community they are.
At every turn in Nuestra Tierra, Chuschagasta residents are excluded from the legal proceedings. One of the shots that defines this dynamic the most is where the defense team tours the scene of the crime, with documentary cameras following along with them. Instead, Lucrecia Martel cuts back to where Chuschagasta witnesses the tour from far away on a hill that makes the defense’s re-examination of the crime scene unintelligible.
As the trial rolls along, the rhetoric gets even nastier, and all the Chuschagasta can do is watch as the defense throws around such dehumanizing arguments. In that regard, language itself becomes a weapon. Much of the dialogue between two or more people in this film comes during the trial itself, and much of it is hostile cross-examination toward the Chuschagasta people. The end result, Amín being found guilty, still feels quite bleak in Nuestra Tierra, only heightened by an epilogue intertitle saying that he was out of prison by 2020.
The pain and suffering just continue. Martel places Nuestra Tierra in firm opposition to this hostility and erasure, and she does so by using the power of images. She listens to various individual members of the Chuschagasta community, and there are many moments of narration from those who appear silently on camera.
In one of the boldest moves Martel has made with the camera, she employs a heavy use of drone footage to give the audience a look at the land that is being contested. Martel uses the drone, a tool initially made for war, to push against the colonial violence that is happening right at this moment. Some of the cinematography work is accompanied by more narration and Martel uses quick pans from the drone’s camera to shift the perspective and conversations at a moment’s notice. All of the archival images, drone shots, and narration from the Chuschagasta shown in Nuestra Tierra not only display the proud history of their community, but also are a means of resistance against the increasing notions that they do not exist as a people.
When documentaries like Nuestra Tierra take on the more taboo and contested political and legal issues of the day, there’s a notion among many of these films that the simple act of recording will lead to action. Through documentaries like No Other Land, which looks the viewer in the eye and wonders what they will do after watching the film, this notion does feel more and more hollow.
Martel doesn’t seem to have too many illusions about how much of a change Nuestra Tierra will make as a documentary. The erasure has been a problem for a long time and, sadly, will continue to be one. The Chuschagasta’s feelings of loss and pain reverberate far past the end credits and will continue to for as long as wealthy landowners come in to steal their homes from them. One way to resist that is documenting. It’s showing oppressors that this community is real and worth fighting for. Any less will lead to a world of more oppression than there already is.
