Our Land

What is land ownership founded upon? 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, the chieftain of the Chuschagasta indigenous people, explores the painfully persistent, yet legally sanctioned legacy of colonialism in Argentina.

In October 2009, entrepreneur Dario Amín and two associates embarked on the construction of a mine and the expulsion of members of the Chuschagasta Indian community from the land they inhabit in the very north of Argentina, a land that Amín claims is his. A conflict breaks out that leads to Chocobar’s death, with the entire incident recorded on a video camera, the only weapon the natives have against the revolvers of the oncoming 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 filmmakers, Lucrecia Martel, herself a native of the northern province of Salta, known for its picturesque deserts, Andean heights and supposedly extinct Indian culture.

Her empathetic and subversive documentary piece provides visibility to those whom history has stubbornly kept out of the frame, their voices silenced. Using an analytical film form that combines harrowing court footage, delicate interviews, the rebellious music of gauchos, and Indian archives and family photographs preserved with a lot of difficulty, Martel joins her protagonists in their appeal for the return of their land, representing the identity backbone of their ancestral bonds and memories. Over the course of 14 years of filming, with the help of protagonists from the Indian community, Martel exhaustively reconstructs the crime and the court dispute that followed, demonstrating firsthand the entrenched corruption and racism of Argentine institutions. In doing so, she masterfully uses drones to recreate the conquering and invasive gaze of the colonizer and its possessive appropriation of vast expanses. While for Amin and his mercenaries, ownership of the land 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 power structures, imposed language barriers, and the dirty web of bureaucracy in every frame, in every testimony, in every image preserved by the community at the center of the story, and in the aerial view that best reveals the land that is the subject of the dispute and over which rhetoric is the last lock of subjugation.