Before the film, there were already images. Images of a murder. Before the film, there was already a story. The history of the colonization of the territory which is now called Argentina, a scaffolding of lies intended to conceal and legitimize crimes. Lucrecia Martel’s fifth feature film is a flight. A momentum that takes off by building on these two precedents.
On October 12, 2009, Javier Chocobar, leader of the indigenous Argentine Chuschagasta community, was killed with a revolver by a former special forces officer who accompanied the man who claims to appropriate the lands of the indios and who records the scene with a small video camera. This scene can be found on YouTube (today, only the beginning, which does not show the murder, remains accessible online). This is where the Argentinian author of the film La Ciénaga (2001), who had not yet realized Zama (2018), discovers it.
In this news item, she identifies a crystallization of the long history of colonial oppression and the injustices imposed on the original peoples, but where the use of current images takes place (the video, YouTube, the echoes of the affair on TV, later on social networks). Lucrecia Martel then undertook immense work, which would last fourteen years.
It is a matter of both documenting a specific situation and placing it in an immensely broader perspective, which concerns his country, but also all of Latin America, and the crimes of the colonial process as a whole. How can we not also hear the echoes of the Palestinian genocide, when “historians” deny the very existence of peoples to legitimize the appropriation of land?
Nuestra Tierra is organized around the progress of the trial of the three assassins, in the court of the capital of the province where the events took place, Tucumán (north-west Argentina). The judicial scenography serves as the trunk of this film-tree, whose branches spread out in multiple directions.
Through the Javier Chocobar affair, the scenes in court thus make visible and audible the endemic racism, the collusion between landowners and the police and repressive apparatus, as well as the production of stories based on domination and exclusion, a process relayed by the Church as well as by academics, as well as by primary schools and the media.
Frame edge and whispers
These scenes organize a composition which, outside the courthouse, gives voice to the members of the Chuschagasta community, makes their individual trajectories and their collective journey visible, inscribes them in multiple landscapes, geographical and historical.
The exceptional success of Nuestra Tierra is due to its way of maintaining the circulation between a specific case, the assassination of Javier Chocobar, its sadly exemplary character of the ongoing violent prevarications against the rights of indigenous communities in Argentina and its broader value of manifestation of a centuries-old historical crime still in progress.
Among the multiple manifestations of the filmmaker’s great art have been the uses of the frame since her beginnings, that is to say also of the off-camera and the edge of the frame, presences at the limit of the visible, which find here, in the documentary register, new relevant manifestations.
Lucrecia Martel is also a virtuoso in the uses of sound, of what is heard, but even more so guessed, whispered, suggested; all these dimensions subtly mobilized to awaken echoes of the very concrete situations that appear. No one knows, like her, how to make people perceive the violence of the silence to which complainants are thus reduced, subjected to the power of enunciation and contempt of the holders of speech and power.
This is the case in the judicial context, both in court and during the reconstruction of the murder in situ which we witness. But, in other sound registers, the stories and songs that accompany the numerous testimonies of the life journey and practices of resistance of the Chuschas, the members of the indigenous community, oppose this.
These practices and these journeys are also documented by an astonishing harvest of archive images produced by the Chuschas themselves, who appear to have made intensive use of photography for decades. They certainly took photos for personal, family, friendly reasons, but where the need to keep traces is discernible, they who are denied both an existence and a past.
At the same time, the film also questions, from several approaches, the very notion of community, just as it works and critiques the multiple uses of different images, produced in different contexts and with different tools. Ranging from the details of the incident to broader historical perspectives, Nuestra Tierra thus exemplarily implements the use of “several types of looks”which is claimed by a work remarkably synchronous with the film, The art of counter-investigationby Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, the translation of which was published in France in May 2025.
The coronation of the drone
To the numerous representation devices already mentioned, another is added, a tool that has become as banal as it is invasive in so many films and which suddenly finds legitimacy and singular power, the drone.
First appearing on screen manipulated by the police, the device so often used for the purposes of oppressive control (not to mention killer drones) becomes, when activated by Lucrecia Martel, the opportunity for an encompassing but attentive gaze, which places people and places in larger (often magnificent) environments, reestablishing proximities and gaps that ground vision and administrative or journalistic approaches tend to mask.
Without sacrificing the readability of the whole, the composite, not unified, character of the elements (factual, narrative, visual, sound, etc.) of which the film is made results from a deliberate choice to move away from simplisms, which always end up crushing the weakest and the truth.
Lucrecia Martel’s direction claims the powers and demands of a cinematic gesture, to be of the same impetus in the fight against injustices and lies, in questions which articulate with each other and reinterpret each other.
Postscript
It so happens that two of the most remarkable contemporary female directors are presenting their new films on the same day and that these films together offer a richly meaningful contrast. While Lucrecia Martel explores the paths of multiple perspectives, of a “cosmogony” of colonial domination, in space and time, taking the risk of a destabilizing form, Silent Frienddirected by Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi, takes a completely different approach.
However, his film also claims to modify the point of view, by placing at the center of its narration a large tree, witness to a succession of episodes. But, within the apparent complexity of its construction in three episodes, in three eras and in three different aesthetics, it renews the codes of novelistic conventions which helped to construct and contribute to maintaining the world that it seemed to denounce.
We are not at all concerned here with putting the two filmmakers or the two films into rivalry. Silent Friend is a brilliant film, which will garner the votes of critics and a movie-loving public, so much the better for it. The aim is to underline the decisive gap between an artistically ambitious project, which is what Ildikó Enyedi’s film is, but nevertheless always within the dominant formatting – which ensures it a much easier reception – and the creative radicality of another relationship, to reality, to stories, to images, one that activates with bravery and generosity Nuestra Tierra.
