Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks)

A landscape bears the traces of centuries of struggle, every layer of earth whispering of loss and resistance. With Nuestra Tierra, Argentine director Lucrecia Martel (La Ciénaga, Zama) delivers her first documentary: a gripping, uncompromising film that links the 2009 murder of Indigenous leader Javier Chocobar to the long history of colonial domination and land dispossession in Latin America.

In Argentina’s Tucumán province, Chocobar was shot dead during a violent clash with three men who laid claim to his community’s land. Though the killing was captured on video, the perpetrators walked free for nine years. When the trial finally came in 2018, it only underscored how deeply injustice and power structures remain entrenched. Martel weaves together courtroom footage with testimonies, family photographs, and the voices of the indigenous Chuschagasta themselves. By placing their memories, stories, and archives at the center, she creates not just a reconstruction of a crime but a journey through four centuries of oppression, denial, and resistance.

Nuestra Tierra is at once intimate and sweeping. Martel lingers on small gestures, the presence of animals, and the everyday rituals of a community, setting them against expansive drone shots of a breathtaking landscape that has long been a battleground. The powerfully evocative score by Alfonso Olguín elevates these images to an almost cosmic register: the music pulses across the horizon, reverberates through the mountains, and makes palpable that the struggle for land is also a struggle for memory and for the future.
The result is a hypnotic cinematic experience that resists simplification and spectacle. Martel lets the story unfold without sentimentality, but with deep empathy and a keen awareness of colonial legacies that continue to shape the present. It is cinema as testimony, and as a call for justice: a film that gives voice to one community while also speaking for so many others whose histories have been pushed to the brink of erasure.