Saturday, 5 September 2026 at 5 pm
Nuestra Tierra
Directed by: Lucrecia Martel
Argentina, USA, Mexico, France, Netherlands, Denmark / 2025 / 120 min.
Language: Spanish
Subtitles: Croatian
What is the basis of land ownership? Is it a legally sanctioned piece of paper? Or centuries of lived history? Lucrecia Martel's important political documentary about the murder of Javier Chocobar, an elder of the indigenous Chuschagasta people, explores the painfully prolonged and legally sanctioned legacy of colonialism in Argentina.
In October 2009, businessman Dario Amín, along with two associates, began constructing a mine and evicting the members of the Chuschagasta indigenous community from the land they inhabit in the far north of Argentina, land which Amín claims as his own. A conflict breaks out, leading to Chocobar's death, and the entire incident is captured on video, the indigenous people's only weapon against the revolvers of the approaching killers. Nine years later, after numerous protests, the trial of Chocobar's killers begins, and in the courtroom is one of the greatest contemporary Latin American film-makers, Lucrecia Martel, herself a native of the northern province of Salta, known for its colourful deserts, Andean highlands and a supposedly extinct indigenous culture.
Her empathetic and subversive documentary gives visibility to those whom history stubbornly keeps out of frame and silences their voices. Through an analytical filmic form that unites harrowing courtroom footage, sensitive interviews, the rebellious music of the gauchos, barely-preserved indigenous archives and family photographs, Martel joins his protagonists' call for the return of their land, which was taken from them, and which forms the identity-defining backbone of their ancestral ties and memories. Over 14 years of filming, with the help of protagonists from the indigenous community, Martel exhaustively reconstructs the crime and the ensuing legal saga, demonstrating first-hand the entrenched corruption and racism of Argentina's institutions. In doing so, she masterfully uses drones to recreate the conqueror's conquering and invasive gaze and its possessive claim to the vast, open spaces. While for Amín and his mercenaries, land ownership is a matter of monetary transaction, for the Chuschagasta community, the land is an extension of their wounded tissue and the erased history of their ancestors. Lucrecia Martel meticulously dismantles the structures of power, the imposed linguistic barriers and the dirty web of bureaucracy in every shot, in every testimony, in every image preserved by the community at the heart of the story, and in the aerial view that best reveals the land in dispute, over which rhetoric is the final lock of subjugation.
Festivals and awards:
BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2025 – Best Film / SAN SEBASTIAN INT'L FILM FESTIVAL 2025 / SUBVERSIVE FILM FESTIVAL 2026