Nuestra Tierra

With her first foray into feature documentary filmmaking, Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel, last at the Festival with the rapturous period film Zama in 2017, chronicles an all-too-true story of injustice with the same piercing attention to detail that characterizes her singular works of fiction. At the heart of Nuestra Tierra is an investigation into the flagrant killing of an Indigenous community leader. But make no mistake: surrounding this emblematic murder case is an infinitely larger, centuries-old story of colonialism and erasure.

In 2009, three men entered a Chuschagasta community in Northern Argentina. They were armed and, claiming ownership of the land, intended to evict the Chuschagasta. During the confrontation, without provocation, these men killed community leader Javier Chocobar. This crime was plainly captured on video, yet it took nine years of protests before the culprits were brought to trial, where they claimed no wrongdoing.

Nuestra Tierra alternates between monitoring the tense legal proceedings, allowing Chuschagasta community members to share their stories through interviews and archival materials, and offering breathtaking explorations of this beautiful land that is being reduced to property, and whose ownership is being contested. All the while, meaning and historical context accumulates through the observation of seemingly small things, such as the presence of animals, the minutia of courtroom interactions, or a man uncovering parallels between the struggle of the Chuschagasta and the movie Ben Hur.

With an approach at once deeply empathic and fundamentally unsentimental, Martel allows this story to unfold unencumbered by editorializing, until its gut-wrenching unfairness simply speaks for itself.

DIANA CADAVID