Nuestra Tierra

Watched at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.

A powerful documentary about the roots of colonialism amongst the indigenous communities and the surrounding conflicts of murder, indegineity, and politics. Lucrecia Martel approach on the subjects carefully, yet tenderly. Exploring it's themes through it's roots, the murder of Javier Chocobar, and it's conflict using great ways of dialogue and presentation, and demonstrating it's themes and tone with a balance and appropriate touch.

Martel is very well-known for her experimental-like style and approach, and what she was able to do on crafting this documentary is perfect. Each imagery, conversation, sound designs and movement observations felt personal, slow yet powerful, and engaging to explore. How indigenous communities have long been through conflicts and problems that they don't deserve to be in due to the effects of negative aspects of human society and beings.

Lucrecia Martel has proven to be one of the best Argentinian filmmakers of our current times, and Martel once again shines with this documentary.

While a documentary focused solely on the murder of Chocobar and the long-delayed trial of those charged may well have been captivating, Lucrecia Martel captures the trial while using it as a frame for a larger canvas that encompasses the centuries-old processes of dehumanization and marginalization of a people. In her first documentary, Martel (The Headless Woman, Zama) explores the Chuschagasta community through the people and their stories, the family photos held dear, the landscape close up and from the vantage point of drones, and from inside the courtroom. Viewers come away with an appreciation of the deep bond between people and place, and the resilience that marks their rise above exploitation.

The initial body-cam footage of the lethal encounter establishes context for the trial, as well as a counter-point to dubious testimony of the defendants. Yet the pace slows as we gradually meet community members who are given voice to share stories of the past, both long ago and recent. Community becomes the central focus, delaying resolution of the trail, while placing the film far from the typical landscape of the true crime genre. Nature and wildlife add a vivid sense of place, a place invisible in the voluminous piles of documents stacked in the courtroom. Connections in the community are suggested in the direct gaze of a horse hosting a tiny bird on its back. Martel's investigation reveals a curious, generous storyteller as adept with documentary as she is with fictional drama. Highly recommended.