This radical, haunting documentary debut from legendary Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel interrogates questions of truth, power and justice following the 2009 killing of indigenous leader Javier Chocobar.
"Our Land” is the work of a director whose attention is rigorous, whose care is genuine, but who is also conscious of her outsider’s perspective.
Landmarks 2025
Nuestra Tierra
In 2009, three armed gunmen attempt to evict members of the indigenous community of Chuschagasta in northern Argentina and in doing so, kill community leader Javier Chocobar. The murder is caught on video. After nearly a decade of grassroots organising and community protest, legal proceedings finally began in 2018. Documenting the trial alongside community testimony, the murder case serves as an entry point to wider questions of colonialism not as a historical event but as a haunting, ever-present structure.
Known for her narrative cinema (Zama NZIFF 2018, The Swamp NZIFF 2000), Landmarks is Argetinian director Lucrecia Martel’s first feature documentary. Here she applies her signature observational camerawork and analytical eye to examine the nature of land dispossession and the limits of a Western legal system to offer any real sense of justice.
Questions of credibility and perception, memory and narrative, authority and shame, abound as archives are both weaponised as a colonial tool and reclaimed as a mode of resistance. Premiering at Venice Film Festival, the film bears a striking potency when considering the spectre of colonisation and land struggles here in Aotearoa, with an atmosphere that lingers long after the sediment has settled.