In the director’s statement for her searing new documentary “Nuestra Tierra (Our Land),” acclaimed Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel writes, “This film works with our mother tongue and its racist complexities, which prevent many from accessing a vital space. The language of documents. The lives of people expelled by papers of dubious value, lives lost in hours of useless procedures. A historical document is the script of a scene that never existed, but that suits those who sign it. Here, cinema can be useful.”
With this essential anti-colonial film, Martel uses the language of cinema, personal photography, and memory to highlight not just of the story of the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar and the subsequent trial of the perpetrators, but also the story of the indigenous Chuschagasta community, who have called the Tucumán Province in northwest Argentina their home for untold generations, despite the country’s attempts to systematically erase them from its history.
In the hands of Martel, a film that on its surface could be considered true crime is transmogrified into something altogether more interesting and urgent. She crafts a film filled to the brim with indigenous oral histories and personal photo archives, and also one that is imbued with an anti-colonial aim as she deconstructs the racist bureaucracy that paved the way for land loss.
Born in Salta, Argentina, Martel was the second of seven siblings and grew up in a home full of storytellers. As a child, Martel was interested in mythology and the Greek and Latin languages, attending an ultra-Catholic secondary school solely because it offered courses in those languages.
Originally, she intended to study physics at the Balseiro Institute, but changed her mind and instead studied art history at the National University of Salta while also taking courses in chemical engineering and zoology in the nearby province of Tucumán. Martel even bred and raised pigs for a year before the poor economy helped her realize it wasn’t the career for her.
Martel then studied advertising at the Catholic University in Buenos Aires while also taking a nighttime animation course at the Film Art Institute of Avellaneda. There she met other students who were studying film.
After producing short films, Martel applied for admission to the National School of Film Experimentation and Production, Argentina’s only state-sponsored film school in the 1980s. After she was one of 30 students admitted (out of over 1,000 applicants), the film school closed shortly after she began studying due to insufficient funding. Not to be derailed, Martel turned to learning filmmaking autodidactically, watching and analyzing films to learn how to make this. This allegedly included watching “Pink Floyd: The Wall” 23 times to learn about montage.
Her first three feature films—“La ciénaga” (2001), “The Holy Girl” (2004), “The Headless Woman” (2008)—are known as the Salta Trilogy, each having been filmed in her home province and focusing on women and girls who operate outside the social norms. She followed these films up with “Zama” (2017), an adaptation of the 1956 novel of the same name by Antonio di Benedetto, which follows Don Diego de Zama, a Spanish colonizer stationed in Asunción, Paraguay, who waits, in vain, for official permission to return home to his family.
As she’s made her indelible mark on the international film world, Martel’s films have screened at film festivals worldwide, including Sundance, Toronto, New York, Berlin, Venice, and Cannes. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at global cultural institutions, including Harvard, MoMA, Film at Lincoln Center, Cambridge, London’s Tate Museum, and Centre Pompidou in Paris. In addition to her standing as a titan of world cinema, she is widely considered a key figure in New Argentine Cinema.
For this month’s Female Filmmakers in Focus column, RogerEbert.com spoke with Martel over Zoom, and via a translator, about finding human uses for new technology, centering the Chuschagasta community in their own story, untangling racist colonial history, and finding inspiration in women.
At TIFF, you said that drones began as part of the war machine, as a part of surveillance. Yet I think the way you subvert a drone’s gaze is really fascinating. Could you talk about why you used drones for this film?
The truth is, I find that every time a new technology comes out, we take a bit of time to actually change the meaning of what it was born out of. For example, the drone was born out of control and from war. As we have begun to appropriate it and it’s taken us some time to really find a human use for it, I hope that we can also find a human use for AI.
Thinking about the way we used it in this film, using the drone footage in combination with the voices of the community, as well as maintaining the sounds of the machine, I was trying to convey the desire to understand what this is all about. It’s incredible how simply using a tool and seriously thinking through it behind the scenes how it changes the result entirely.
You have personal photo archives, which are not always considered important to history, but are the history of a family and even of a people. Through this personal archive, as they share their memories with you, you elicit their oral history. I know it took you about 10 years of working with the community to get them to open up and show you all these photos. Could you talk about how that came about and when you decided to incorporate these archives so beautifully in the telling of their story?
You know, the first photos like this that I saw actually came from Chocobar’s widow. These were pictures that were taken by Chocobar. You can see how different they are. It’s a little bit how we were talking about earlier with the drone, that how much it changes when the intention behind the camera changes, and how evident it that is, as you can see in those pictures, these were pictures of reunions and of parties, and you can see that the level of comfort of the subjects, you can see Javier’s intention in the types of images that he took. As I saw these images, I thought that they would be revealed over time in the film. This will give us the opportunity to convey a sense of community from a first-person perspective.
Then after nearly ten years, María Rasguido showed me her pictures, and I saw another possibility, and it was the possibility of being able to see that process of migration, and that exchange between the city and the countryside, and that exchange between the people that left and the types of lives that they were building in the city, and again, being able to narrate that from the first person through this material.
I think, for the Argentinian public in particular, it was very impactful to see these types of photographs, because the photographs we tend to see are kind of anthropological or held by the oligarchy. So it was quite shocking to see this type of photography and to understand the desire in this population, which is always infantilized and always portrayed as uncivilized. To see their desire for a self-portrait, their desire to register these moments, and their desire to transcend them. I think it was also very politically impactful for the Argentinian audience.
One of the community members says that having a dialogue means giving up a part of the land. Could you talk a bit about centering their stories, centering their voices, and centering them as caretakers of this land in a way that’s not bureaucratic but true to who they are as a community?
I didn’t want something that happens very often in this type of documentary or about indigenous communities, that is, to idealize the relationship between the community and the territory. Not because I don’t think that their relationship to the territory is better, but because I think that, at the end of the day, that’s a documentary that should be done by the community itself. What I was interested in was showing the superposition of the community with the rest of the Argentinian population and the state, and the impossibility of understanding each other. Because in those dialogues, there’s always a negotiation on the land, and inevitably, whenever the mainstream population comes into contact with the indigenous communities, they’re always the ones that end up losing.
In many ways, it’s not just the land, but politically in our culture, we have used language in order to impose objectives, not to understand, but to try to negotiate some kind of win. For the community, it’s very clear that the dialogue is simply another way for us to win, but, quote-unquote, peacefully.
There are some edits in the film where you juxtapose dialogue over footage that contradicts what is being said. Usually, it’s one of the witnesses at the trial, and then you’ll have footage that contradicts what they’ve just said. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you incorporated sound and images that aren’t necessarily synced but tell a story of contrast.
I think in any country that was a colony, at some point, there is this contradiction between what you learn in school and what you see in the country. I think my fascination with these topics stems from the feeling that the education I received didn’t give me the tools to understand what was really happening. I feel that there’s always a type of, I think, the liberties movement is seen between language and reality, that we use the word Indio or indigenous person, we use it to insult, and when we’re using it to insult, we’re very sure that they’re indigenous. But when those same indigenous people use it to make their claims over their land, then we’re asking, then we have doubts, then we need proof of language, and we need proof of all of this. So it’s incredible the schizophrenia that happens in a society that was part of a colony.
A film like this can show you other ways of thinking and avenues to explore regarding issues we might take for granted. Do you see yourself as a political filmmaker, someone who offers a different perspective on the status quo? Is that something you feel you actively do with your cinema?
I think that since I started making films, I have wanted to intervene in public discourse and in my community’s story. Not just to do this as a means of personal expression, but to be a part of the destiny that I was being constructed in my country. And even if I had chosen another activity, I probably would have had the same approach. It’s a very hard time thinking about what the destiny of a person is if it’s not communal. I think it’s quite fantastic for me to try to think of an activity that is absolutely individual or that has an objective of being alone and being individually focused.
I don’t consider myself someone who has a political agenda. I think the thoughts and themes I explore are very human and quite normal. I don’t ascribe to anything in particular. Nor do I feel I have an obligation to any particular ideology or political position you can claim is left or right. I don’t understand politics in that way. I think of political activity as simply part of citizenship and of trying to build their country.
As you’ve worked on this film for over a decade, and now it’s been almost 20 years since Chocobar was murdered, what has it been like for you to stay with a story for almost two decades? What do you feel that’s been done to you as an artist and as a person?
I think there’s a long period of rethinking many things. I don’t know to what extent this has affected me or how it will affect my future. But I do notice, and I feel that I’m in a different place than I was before in terms of the way that I think about cinema. I was at a screening where many members of the audience were from the indigenous community. We were in a place where they normally screen mainstream American films, and we were now gathered together, these two communities, watching this film. It gave me a strong feeling of possibility, of the possibility of being able to talk out our differences and discuss, and the power of film to do that, to open up those conversations.
I feel like here in the United States, it is perhaps not fully understood because cinema is part of your culture. You’re watching American films, but in Latin America, it’s actually quite strange to see a Latin American film being premiered. It is rare to see a film that reflects your own society.
Are there any women who either inspired you when you were starting out, or who are making films today that you really love and think people should know about?
My colleague, the scriptwriter for this film, is María Alché. She has two beautiful films. One is called “A Family Submerged.” The other one is “Puan,” and she’s the director your readers should learn about. In general, I have been inspired by oral narratives and by the family itself, which is often led by women.
