“The Argentine government trained me for this”

Lucrecia Martel’s first documentary transforms the trial surrounding Javier Chocobar's murder into a compelling reflection on the legacies of colonialism. The documentary is showing at Bozar, Flagey, and the Palace, starting today.

It takes several minutes to realize that Nuestra tierra is filming a trial. Lucrecia Martel opens her first documentary with a satellite view of Earth, accompanied by religious chants. Little by little, the camera zooms in. Northern Argentina. These distant, abstract images become increasingly recognizable. The satellite images give way to drone footage. The religious chants fade out, making way for traditional music from the province of Tucumán. Mountains and paths come into view, and the Chuschagasta community appears on screen. Even before a single word is spoken, the filmmaker reminds us that this trial is, first and foremost, a story of a struggle for land.

In 2009, Javier Chocobar, a member of the Chuschagasta Indigenous community, was murdered while opposing the seizure of his people’s lands by men seeking to exploit their mineral resources. Fourteen years later, the acclaimed filmmaker Lucrecia Martel—who is also from northern Argentina—filmed the entire trial. But very quickly, we realize that the courtroom is merely the tip of an iceberg as vast as Argentina’s colonial history. The courtroom is merely a threshold. Martel crosses it to recount everything that led up to this moment.

Every detail is meticulously recreated to the point of nausea. As in her fictional films, the Argentine director constructs her narrative through sound as much as through image. A chair being moved. Whispered conversations in a hallway. A silence that settles in before someone speaks. Glances that meet. The cinematography is superb, but it never seeks to embellish reality. It observes. Lucrecia Martel aims, as usual, to “challenge the idea that reality is natural.” Her film shows precisely that nothing is: neither borders, nor power dynamics, nor official narratives.

The documentary brilliantly exposes the inequality of the judicial system by dissecting its every flaw. As the hearings unfold, two worlds come face to face. On one side are the defendants, who have mastered the codes of justice, its language, its vocabulary, and its procedures. On the other is the Indigenous community, which must defend its very existence within an institution that was never designed with them in mind. Words sometimes seem to fail when even their own legal existence is called into question.

“The Argentine government trained for this” says one of the defendants during the trial—a police officer by training—as he explains the actions he took to defend himself during a confrontation with the Chuschagasta community. Martel never responds directly to these remarks. She lets them resonate, letting their meaning sink in. The Argentine state has trained them all to do this, to see this way, to think this way, to feel this way. The documentary does not accuse; it exposes the mechanisms of a colonial mindset that continues to permeate institutions, the judiciary, history books, atlases, and churches.

To counterbalance this violence, the director draws on another time: that of the community’s photographs, taken over the years. Portraits, everyday gestures, family scenes, moments of happiness. They remind us that defending a territory is not just a matter of standing before a court. We defend a way of living in a place, a memory in all its complexity. An uneven territory that people love as much as they flee from it. Faced with economic inequality, many families leave to work in the city and become domestic workers for wealthy families in Tucumán or Buenos Aires. Often, in a cruel twist of fate, they end up working for families of magistrates, judges, or lawyers who, during the day, are responsible for legally expropriating the land of their ancestors.

The trial unfolds like a real thriller. Behind the murder, economic interests linked to mining gradually come to light. The verdict is finally handed down: ten, eighteen, and twenty-two years in prison. An important decision, no doubt. But the film leaves a more ambiguous impression. As if justice always comes after the violence. Always too late.

One image sums up the director’s intentions: a drone flies calmly over the mountains before the image blurs. The drone has just been struck by a bird of prey. For a few seconds, the machine veers off course and crashes to the ground. Nature resists the gaze that claims to dominate it. This shot—as brief as it is magnificent—perhaps says everything about Lucrecia Martel’s project.

Nuestra tierra is not the story of a trial. It is the story of a country that continues to write its history by meticulously selecting what it decides to forget—about what states fabricate, about those they choose to erase, and about those who survive, despite everything. A historian interviewed in the film sums up this battle over memory in two sentences:

“What will history remember?

History will lie. As always.”