Known for her visually and aurally, densely layered films, taking on Argentina's society of haves and have nots, esteemed filmmaker Lucrecia Martel's foray into the documentary form culminates to Our Land, a long gestating project that started in 2011, when Martel started reading the materials surrounding the murder of Javier Chocobar, a leader of Chuschagasta indigenous community in Argentina's Tucumán Province.
Combing through old archives, old video footage, testimonies and interviews and oral history, aided by new technology, Martel creates another complex and nuanced continuation of her investigation into the country's colonial history and injustices perpetrated on its indigenous population, mirroring in spirit, her epic masterpiece, Zama which came out 8 years ago.
Our Land starts with the satellite image of earth, then we zoom in to the topography of Argentina's northwest legion, revealing lush forest, then to the young girls playing soccer in the soccerfield, as the drone glides over the landscape. Uncharistically, Martel seems to be incorporating technology into her documentary, in stark contrast with her subjects - the people who worked the land for generations and their adversaries- founding fathers of Argentina; the colonizers who exploit the natives and went on the land theft, ever since the 15th century. The dissonance of her bird's eye view/big-brothers-watching-you method, and the rugged landscape and its inhabitants, is the point of Our Land.
Case in point, Martel leaves the footage of a drone getting hit by a bird in mid-air - as jarring and humorous as it looks, she is not interested in perfect gliding shots of drone footage over nature, like some David Attenborough style nature documentary. She is using the technology to make a point.
In 2009, the defendants, the landowner Dario Luis Amin and his two former police officer friends who went into the territory, armed with guns to intimidate and forcefully evict the Chuschagasta community, their best evidence of their innocence (in their minds) is their own videotaping of the confrontation and murder. The shaky video tape is played over and over again throughout the film.
As the trial finally takes place 9 years after the murder in 2018, the defendants' thin justification was that they were threatened and outnumbered. On paper, Amin, a former government official, is the land owner and according to the government records, indigenous people in that region went extinct in the 1800s.
Martel provides a wealth of interviews and ephemera - photographs, family histories and artifacts, years of court documents from the legal battles the community waged on for decades, long before Chocobar's death. It's also in the faces of the region's inhabitants- distinct from Argentina's general population with mainly their European ancestry. Antonia Hortensia Mamani, the widow of Chocobar, displays hundreds of old fading photographs, many taken by her late husband who was an analog photography enthusiast, and laments the legacy of their history being lost.
It becomes clear as the trial goes on, that what we are witnessing are two competing narratives - One the Argentine state's account and the other, people's account. At one point, the defendants explain in their own words, why they shoved approaching Chocobar, "the Argentine State taught us to do that," effectively making the government the defendant as a whole.
Our Land's story resonates because we see it happening everywhere in the world now - from Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine to a local level- here in New York, it's deed theft - coaxing longtime black and brown residents out of their homes, by greedy landowners and corporations, aided by NYPD.
The arrogance displayed in Amin's video becomes the defendants' downfall. Technology can be a double edged sword. The recordings are there for everyone to see and judge. But with deepfakes and A.I., the future of truth is unknown. Amin's 22 year sentence was appealed and he served only two years in jail, only to die of Covid. Two other dependants' 15 year sentence was appealed but then upheld later.
As with her narrative films which show satiric lives of the Argentine upper-class and the state's ugly colonial history, Martel shines a light on the daily struggles of her country's indigenous population with Our Land. The film is a meticulously researched and tactfully shot and presented, comfortably fitting in her impressive filmography.
Our Land opens in New York and San Fransisco May 1, followed by Los Angeles May 8. National rollout to follow. The Headless Woman 4K restoration opens at Metrograph in NYC on May 8.
