OUR LAND – Review by Sarah Ward
It feels both incomplete and inadequate to label Our Land (Nuestra Tierra) ‘true crime’, even if the label fits Argentine director Lucrecia Martel’s first-ever feature-length non-fiction film. A very real wrongdoing, the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar from the Tucumán Province’s Indigenous Chuschagasta community, drives the documentary. Martel chronicles the nine-years-later court proceedings, accused and witness testimony included. She shows the shaky video recording of Chocobar’s death. Her film peers on as lawyers argue, the judiciary observes and one of the defendants is somehow permitted to confront a bystander who is sharing his perspective into evidence. And a keen sense of justice’s selective blindness, of its imperfections at best and miscarriages at worst, remains an unshakeable presence. This engrossing and important documentary is unmistakably another of Martel’s movies to interrogate colonialism in her homeland, however, as her 2001 debut La ciénaga, 2008’s The Headless Woman and 2017’s stunning Zama each are — and it is extraordinary.
Martel, who also helmed 2004’s The Holy Girl and now co-writes Our Land with that picture’s star María Alché, has an enviable track record across her mere five films in 25 years (shorts and anthology chapters also line her resume across the period). That the director’s move into full-length documentary matches her four fictional features for quality shouldn’t surprise anyone. That she knows the factual format’s tropes and traditions, as well as how to deploy them incisively and in her own manner, shouldn’t astonish viewers either. Made indisputably plain by the urgent and haunting Our Land, which started its development as a docudrama hybrid called Chocobar, is the fact that Martel’s instincts to lay bare the colonialist imprint upon Argentina are as much a creative inspiration as the formal radicalism that shaped her previous movies. Here, that impetus also manifests in doing what her country long hasn’t, and neither have many other nations with their own Indigenous cultures: giving voice to the Chuschagasta people.
That Our Land tells a locally specific tale, yet equally explores incidents and actions that could occur (and have) anywhere with a colonial history, is underscored by Martel’s jump to the heavens to start the film. From space, she gazes down on Earth. Next, she hones in on Argentina, then on the area at the centre of the legal case over Chocobar’s killing. Drone footage may be a documentary staple to the point of overuse in general and utter saturation in true-crime fare, but there’s no doubting its effectiveness in Martel’s hands. As well as conveying the truth that the plight of the Chuschagasta community is a plight shared around the globe, the bird’s-eye-view imagery grounds Our Land’s details in the natural world, and connects them to humanity’s continued quest to conquer and exploit it no matter the costs paid and the victims harmed.
As the court hears and the video immortalises, Chocobar was among a group of fellow Chuschagasta that landowner Dario Luis Amín, plus former police officers Luis Humberto Gómez and José Valdivieso, tried to evict from a site in Argentina’s north that the Indigenous inhabitants have ties to dating back centuries and further. Although the visual evidence is clear on who the armed aggressors are and also who is not at fault, that doesn’t stop Amín and his co-accused from claiming self-defence. More than that, the trio appear incapable of believing that their account won’t simply be accepted without question. That almost a decade lapsed between Chocobar’s murder and the trial, during which the culprits remained free, also says plenty about the vast power imbalance against the Chuschagasta people; tracing paths from the 17th century onwards, Our Land’s guiding force has plenty more to impress about their unfair treatment.
Martel strives to counter the inequity. Alongside its time in court — plus back at the scene of the crime for the perpetrators’ grossly one-sided recreation — Our Land is an act of ethnographic portraiture of Chocobar’s community. His widow Antonia is among those who relay both personal and historical tales, as set to a loving and thorough survey of archival photos. Such words paint a picture not just of marginalisation and discrimination, but of attempted erasure. Martel provides other examples to stress that point; Amín et al’s attorneys even endeavour to assert that there can be no right to the land that Chocobar was slain on for the Chuschagasta people, regardless of how far back they’re linked to the terrain, because they no longer exist as a cohort. When tactics like these are used in court and while documenting the trial overall, Martel chooses to shoot Amín and company from the side and behind. The world frequently gives Chocobar’s killers and those like them the luxury of monopolising the frame and the narrative, but Our Land steadfastly refuses to follow suit.
Seizing a popular genre not just to expose and empower, but to employ its conventions to subvert the norm, isn’t as common as it should be. It isn’t hard to find instances among recent cinema releases of the exact opposite, aka happily and gleefully embracing the expected to play out solely as expected; indeed, they’re the rule rather than the exception. There is a radical side to Our Land, then, including in how it wields the mechanics and form of documentary storytelling for its unapologetically polemical purpose. It also isn’t hard to find emotion in the death of an Indigenous man at the hands of a white landowner and his ex-cop offsiders, the lengthy and fraught efforts to bring those responsible to justice, and the oppression of Indigenous peoples that underpins it all, but no one else could’ve achieved that feat as empathetically and unflinchingly as Martel does in what hopefully isn’t her only feature doco for long.
