Lucrecia Martel is one of Latin America’s acclaimed arthouse filmmakers of European descent. After dealing with Indigenous issues in short films like “ Leagues ” and “ New Argirópolis ,” she had a global breakout with 2017’s historical biopic “ Zama ,” about an 18 th century colonial magistrate. That powerful, often strikingly funny work, sought to deconstruct her own white colonial perspective, an auto-critique that she revisits in “Our Land,” an unbalanced but effective documentary about the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar, an Indigenous land defender from Chuschagasta community in Argentina’s rural northwest, who was fatally shot while protecting his home from encroaching mining company men.
The opening frames, scored by an operatic lament , begin in outer space and gradually approach Argentina’s lush Tucumán Province from above, ensuring that the viewer is clear about the story’s global stakes and ecological relevance. The movie’s Spanish-language title, “Nuestra Tierra” (“Our Earth”) also declares the connection between one man’s death and the fate of the planet. We are introduced to the details of this death through the court testimony of Chocobar’s killers, who claim self-defense. However, video footage and Indigenous eyewitness accounts paint very different pictures of the incident. This “Rashomon”-like approach ends up bringing into focus the movie’s real villains: a colonial legacy and legal system that continues to sanction de facto ethnic cleansing. This film doesn’t always do justice to its intended themes of collectivism and community, tenets vital to its Indigenous subjects. Martel’s exploration of them as individuals is often languid and disconnected. As Chocobar’s friends and loved ones are summoned by the Argentinian court, she tells each of their stories through lengthy photo romans of old family pictures accompanied by voice-over and ambient sounds. Still images hereby become imbued with life and motion, detailing the upbringings and young adulthoods of the aged Chuschagasta faces we see throughout the film. However, the film is all too content to skip haphazardly from one subject to the next, and the absence of Chocobar among these recollections looms especially large the further they drone on. “Our Land” focuses poignantly on the Chuschagasta’s helplessness. That the documentary fails to explore the full lives of its Chuschagasta subjects (or the logistics of their displacement) is an unfortunate constraint of its two-hour runtime. It may also be a limitation of Martel’s own perspective as an outsider, whose storytelling feels more at home when holding a mirror to the upper echelons of colonial hierarchy, rather than those affected by its runoff. However, this deficiency in cinematic point of view — of which Martel seems keenly aware — must be measured against the film’s success as a haunting assessment of the institutional exploitation and abuse of indigenous communities. At one point, the defense attorneys for the accused object to the movie’s making, with the understanding that merely bearing witness to this corrupt process risks exposing the law’s intrinsic biases. While the strip mining of land is never depicted, merely gestured toward, “Our Land” gradually exposes how the Chuschagasta are legally strip mined of personhood. Within the confines of the court, Martel catches glimpses of her Indigenous subjects in worried or contemplative silence, or struggling to answer inquiries about deeds and ownership pertaining to the legal rights of mine owners. It becomes readily apparent that these questions simply do not make sense within the Chuschagasta’s framework of land, community, and cultural heritage. Why should a piece of paper, “official” though it may be, supersede generations of Indigenous presence?
Through this claustrophobic portrayal of legal attacks faced by Indigenous peoples, who are threatened by extractive industries and the structures that protect them, “Our Land” focuses poignantly on the Chuschagasta’s helplessness. In the face of a legal system designed to rob them of their dignity, this serves as an enraged call to action and a reminder that modern society’s understanding of nature as a collection of “resources” is neither universal nor naturally occurring. Despite its shortcomings, the film’s most piercing and powerful moments suggest the Chuschagasta cosmology — in which land isn’t something one defiles, but which binds people across generations — might be more innate.
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