Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | September 14, 2025
In 2009, indigenous activist and Chuschagasta community leader Javier Chocobar was murdered. The case sent shockwaves through Argentina as three men stood accused of killing him. Video footage of his death went viral. Within and outside of the courtroom, the conversation moved from one of a violent death to the nation’s generations-long denial of its colonialist rot.
Lucrecia Martel is one of the best directors of the 21st century. While she only has four feature films to her name, each of them are masterpieces (and three of them were included in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll of the greatest films of all time.) Nuestra Tierra, also known as Landmarks, is her first documentary, a passion project she has worked on for well over a decade.
Martel’s work is frequently defined by its slow-burn approach to showing how the Argentine bourgeoisie lounge around while the world burns. In La ciénaga, her confident debut, a self-absorbed family spend their Summer in a decaying country estate where their indigenous servants wait on them and pay witness to their rot. The Headless Woman sees someone falling into paranoia as they wonder if they hit a dog with their car or a child. Zama, one of the true masterpieces of the past decade, is a Kafka-esque exploration of the colonialist invasion of South America through the eyes of a magistrate who wants to climb the social ladder back to Europe. Martel’s examinations of her home country’s past and its reverberations to the present day are often allegorical rather than literal, bold in their dissections of class, race, and politics. She finds beauty via her severe aesthetic, featuring lots of still shots and non-invasive mise-en-scene. It makes for a fluid move to documentary, where she has extended her thematic concerns into true crime narrative.
The Chuschagasta community has spent decades trying to fight for its legal autonomy through the courts, only for white landowners to claim ownership of their communal spaces and demand their eviction. This is the impetus for the entire film, as three white men — businessman Darío Amín, and former police officers Luis Humberto Gómez and Eduardo José Valdivieso — defend themselves from the charge of murder. Despite grainy phone footage of the shooting, which still makes clear the culprits and the victims, the men insist that they were the true victims. Not only that but they were the land’s true owners and had every right to turn up with guns and intimidate the indigenous population. According to the defence, Chuschagasta isn’t even a legitimate group in the 21st century.
In the court, Martel’s camera is still, not unlike how it is in her feature films. She focuses on the legal teams who drink water from wine cups and pour over documents piled up past their faces. The defendants are undefiant to the point of smarm, while Chocobar’s family and community look solemn, as though they know justice will never be served. There’s no Law & Order-esque flair here. No score or dramatic movement. It’s not so much that bureaucracy is thrilling enough without it. Martel just knows that the emotional strife of watching your community become a ‘but there are two sides’ debate doesn’t need to be made more dramatic.
Martel makes heavy use of drone footage to capture the land. During the post-screening Q&A I attended, Martel talked about how drones were created to be weapons of war and that cameras weren’t added to them until later. It gave her the chance to hijack the technology for artistic use, but also an undeniably invasive perspective for her film. She is using the colonizer’s tool to survey the land that is being stolen from the Chuschagastas. The smoothness of the camera atop this machine offers a militaristic gaze over this land that the settlers have tried to occupy. The supposed neutrality of this style, one that has been used to the point of cliché in many a true crime documentary, is anything but that. In one scene, the drone is knocked down by a passing eagle. Nature wins.
But tech can only go so far. Its objectivity can be questioned or manipulated. The grainy footage of Chocobar’s murder isn’t evidence enough for courts to convict a killer. Decades’ worth of archival photography and documentation show the Chuschagastas’ history but the law of the overtaken land tries to claim otherwise. The lawyers, witnesses, and defendants return to the scene of the crime to offer their conflicting versions of events, with reenactments whose cold professionalism cannot deflect from the sheer ghoulishness of the spectacle. One lawyer cites a professor’s report that the Chuschagastas are extinct, to which he responds with a shrug of ‘eh, academia isn’t always right.’
Martel spent many years talking to the Chuschagastas, including Javier Chocobar’s family and friends, eager to show how little of their history had been accurately told. Martel wants to show him as a man and not a symbol as he became in death. The sepia-toned photographs of their community, which dates back a thousand years at least, show how colonialism reshaped their futures. The past feels immediate, interspersed with Martel’s coverage of the murder trial and that drone footage that shows a gorgeous and unchanging land. The film opens with shots from space, the ultimate bird’s eye view that was once unimaginable to humans. The shape of South America itself and its terrain from this distance feels almost abstract, a sense heightened further by the ways the drone cameras flip perspectives.
It’s no spoiler to note that, while all three men were found guilty, they all got out of prison within a couple of years. Very little coverage of this case exists in English-language news media and, aside from the dedicated work of activists like Amnesty International, the murder of an indigenous man by settlers has gone all but ignored outside of Argentina. What Nuestra Tierra does so effectively is to show how Chocobar’s life and death were part of a centuries-long fight that nobody in power wishes to pay attention to, but one that continues for good reason. It’s the personal made political and vice versa, and it’s depicted with the sharpness and careful anger that has long defined Martel’s impeccable filmography.
Nuestra Tierra had its North American premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.
