Criticism of 'Our Land': Lucrecia Martel reveals a murder motivated by property

In the fragmented mysteries of the great Argentine filmmaker Lucretia Martel, her explorations always begin with sensory flashes: faces, spaces, objects, sounds in paralyzing procession. The language is its own, resulting in disorienting but pure representations of the worlds of modern elites (“La Ciénega,” “The Headless Woman”) and 18th-century settlers (“Zama”) alike.

But now, with his first feature-length documentary, “Our Land,” Martel unravels a political crime and the larger crimes behind it with vital clarity. The film focuses on the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar, a Chuchagasta Indian from the province of Tucumán in northwestern Argentina, who was shot while defending his ancestral land from an incursion by thugs. The weight of the issue at hand – stolen lands, territorial rights and the late recognition of the native peoples of a colonized country – awakens a tempting lucidity from the typically elusive Martel on a serious issue that requires discipline.

In one sense, he's grappling with a rights issue too painful to be aggressively aestheticized, but he's also exploring a blood-soaked injustice that can't be dealt with conventionally. In fact, it begins with rolling satellite images from space, as if to say: This appropriation of nature is a problem in the world, not just in Argentina.

What follows, alternating between a courtroom and a vast disputed land (filmed with dreamlike urgency by cinematographer Ernest de Carvalho), is a fair and visually dazzling swirl of events and feelings, past and present. It is also anchored in the stories of a community desperate to reclaim the territory they have cultivated for centuries. “Our Land” is the most honorable documentary you're likely to find this year about what fights look like in today's era of grab-what-you-can robbery.

First, we hear from the defendants, captured on Martel's cameras at their 2018 trial in Buenos Aires (an unconscionable nine years after the shooting). The three defendants (a businessman and two former police officers) fail to position themselves as the true victims when their own portable video of the incident shows the opposite: the confrontation with the Chuchagastas only escalated because they were bringing a gun. Their lawyers unpleasantly promote a narrative of ownership versus trespassers, supported by reams of documents and swapped historical dates.

But as Martel patiently unfolds the Chuchagastas' perspective—personal narratives brought to life in intimate photographs, atmospheric sound design, and warm, homespun imagery—we begin to understand that documents and archives are a false battlefield given their hundreds of years of careful care. For starters, one community member distrusts dialogue and calls it a means to “give up something.”

“Our Earth” is the work of a director whose attention is rigorous, whose care is genuine, but who is also aware of her outsider perspective. It is the respect of an ally. There is no better proof of this than in his drone shots of the sun-drenched valley of this embattled community: elegant, purposeful, even awkward visits (a bird hits one) from the air. They are a reminder that she is the filmmaker, examining a story that belongs to others. Documentaries don't get much more honest than that.