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Eight years since Zama and more than two since she shared details, Lucrecia Martel has returned with her first feature-length documentary, Landmarks (Nuestra Tierra in its native tongue). The look at the murder of indigenous Argentine activist Javier Chocobar has screened at Venice and will come to TIFF and NYFF, ahead of which is an English-subtitled trailer.
As Martel told us in 2023, “I started working on this film in 2010––so if anything Zama, from 2017, is the sequel. I’m still editing Chocobar. I don’t know if the title will be Chocobar at this point, but the film is all about the crime involving this man. It’s been 13 years. […] I have 300 hours of material. I have edited some parts of it with Miguel Schverdfinger, who edited The Headless Woman and Zama. […] I’m sure it’s going to be much less interesting than many of the documentaries made by filmmakers who make documentaries. But you have to understand this is a topic that is absolutely crucial to my area, to the Salta region.”
Here’s NYFF’s synopsis: “In October 2009, Javier Chocobar, a member of the Indigenous Chuchagasta community in northwest Argentina’s Tucumán Province, tried to defend himself and his people from being forcibly evicted from their land by a local landowner and two former police officers. As a result, the 68-year-old man was shot and killed, and two other community members were wounded. In her expansive and enlightening first feature documentary, the great Argentinean filmmaker Lucrecia Martel (Zama, NYFF55) takes a sweeping approach to this tragic true story, triangulating the murder trial of the three men, the lives of Chocobar and his fellow Chuchagasta people, and the centuries-old, colonialist legacy of land and property theft across Latin America. With a ravishing, at times vertiginous visual approach to filming the natural beauty of the contested land, Martel pays cinematic tribute to people whom history has systematically tried to erase.”
Watch below:
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