Earth and Sky
By A.G. Sims

New York Film Festival 2025:
Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks)
Dir. Lucrecia Martel, 2025, Argentina/U.S./Mexico/France/Netherlands/Denmark, no distributor

Operatic music lends a view of Earth’s orbiting satellites an air of drama and grandeur. The opening shot of Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks), Lucrecia Martel’s long-awaited follow-up to Zama (2018), looks like it could be out of a David Attenborough–narrated documentary. Martel doesn’t frequently indulge in establishing shots. In the critically acclaimed SaltaTrilogy, which established her as an auteur of the New Argentine Cinema, as well as the beguiling colonial epic Zama, she throws you right in the middle of her novelistic worlds, which are built in delirious close-ups, unexpected cuts, and alien soundscapes that subvert her asymmetric visuals. Martel’s perspective is so intimate and surreal, watching her films can feel like putting your eye up to the keyhole of a stranger’s motel room and seeing something you weren’t supposed to see. That Nuestra Tierra—co-written with María Alché, who played Amalia in Martel’s The Holy Girl (2004)—begins not up close, but zoomed out into space, is instructive, then, inviting us to think beyond location and time, before even meeting the subject of this story. The all-seeing satellite, an artificial Eye of Sauron, suggests that the cumulative record of humanity is in question. All of human history is on trial.

Martel’s first documentaryis about the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar, an activist and leader of Argentina’s indigenous Chuchagasta community, during a dispute with a local landowner. Chocobar’s murder was recorded by his killer and posted on YouTube, sparking national outrage and demands for justice across the country and leading Martel to make a film. The attack that led to Chocobar’s murder wasn’t an isolated incident. It was emblematic of a history of violence against native people over the rights to their lands, while the federal government looked the other way. Nuestra Tierra follows the murder trial from beginning to end, supplementing courtroom footage with troves of personal archives and oral histories, gradually building a damning account of 500 years of dispossession and violence against indigenous citizens. All nations are founded on myths. Declarations of independence often involved janky handovers of power and land claims from crumbling empires to a wealthy elite. As those claims changed hands through history, their legitimacy was never questioned, while the communities who lived and worked the land were bullied, intimidated, silenced, and killed. Martel strips Argentina’s mythmaking down to its colonial foundations, going all the way back to the 17th century to tell the story of the Chuchagastas.

It happened on October 12. Defendants Dario Luis Amín, a local landowner, and two former police officers, Luis Uberto Gomez and José Valdiviesoare, drove up through the hills of northwest Argentina’s Tucumán Province. Their intention was to evict the Chuchagastas from their lands. When they were met along their path by members of the community, the men parked and got out of their trucks. Amín was armed and recording. He claimed to own the official titles to the land. Chocobar and others defended their right to be there. The argument turned physical, and Amín drew his gun, shooting Chocobar dead. Gomez, Valdiviesoare, and Amín were all arrested, but it took nine years for the case to go to trial. Only in 2018 were they tried and convicted.

Martel and cinematographer Ernesto de Carvalho make heavy use of drone footage in Nuestra Tierra. After the shot of space, we see aerial views of the rural landscape. A drone camera swoops into a girls’ soccer game. As the trial begins and the cameras enter the courtroom, instead of diegetic sound, we hear disembodied audio that screeches and thumps like a microphone being set up and plugged into an amp. It sounds like something a band might leave at the end of a song recording to give it more texture. Martel’s sound design is characteristically fascinating; she layers artifice over a reality that’s already in contention. These digital elements suggest an imposing modernity that clashes like cymbals with the natural environment. At one point in the film, a drone captures an ethereal white horse on a hillside. The animal stares boldly into the camera, as the machine flies closer, before galloping in the other direction. This unwanted attention echoes, in spirit, the intrusion that Amín captured on his handheld camera on October 12, 2009, in blurry footage that’s projected and analyzed in court.

Amín’s video from the day of the murder is at the center of the trial. The defense tries to cast doubt on the identity of the shooter, while claiming that the men feared for their lives, and the shooting was in self-defense. The defense attorney pauses the video at a moment where one of the former cops pushes a community member and shuffles back, and his client asserts, “The Argentine state taught us to do that.” It’s a moment of revelation that suggests the state had a role in Chocobar’s murder—perhaps speaking unintentionally to the filmmaker’s thesis. The footage operates on symbolic levels, calling back, implicitly, to a long history of violence against indigenous people that began with the Spanish conquistadores who arrived in Buenos Aires in the 1500s. The way the video of the murder proliferated online has echoes of a Minneapolis police officer’s murder of George Floyd, which also achieved a grim virality, and the videos circulating social media of the genocide and displacement of Palestinians in Gaza. In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, violent attacks and land grabs in Palestinian villages are frequently recorded on phones and posted to TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram. In each of these cases, like Chocobar’s murder, the dissemination of disturbing images—indisputable evidence of state and state-supported violence—enraged and mobilized scores of people across the globe.Martel’s fixation on the “digital eye” motif in the film is both commentary on surveillance culture as well as a rejoinder to the ubiquitous government warning: “We’re watching you.”Technological progress has undoubtedly been a double-edged sword for human rights, both advancing malevolent government agendas and undermining them. For the disempowered, themarginalized, and the colonized, these videos function as illusion-shattering proof, loosening the state’s grip on collective memory.

Marteljuxtaposes the digital video with weathered photos taken by members of the community on older analog cameras that she and her team scanned over the course of years. The Chuchagasta community’s archive is rich with pictures, videos, and paintings that tell a different story than the one outlined in legal contracts and titles paraded by the defense as evidence of ownership. As the images fill the screen, Chocobar’s widow, Antonia Hortensia Mamaní, describes black-and-white photos developed from her husband’s camera, which she says he always had with them. Mamaní talks about long days of cutting sugar cane, getting married at 21, and how Chocobar made horse saddles. In the end, Martel presents two competing narratives—the Argentinian state’s, and the indigenous community’s—about how we got here. Together, they reveal a deeper truth about how these kinds of injustices have persisted over time despite new leaders across new generations. The Kafkaesque maze of bureaucratic hurdles the Chuchagastas repeatedly navigated in their quest to legally claim the hills where they have resided for centuries was no accident. These obstacles were part of a deliberate and sophisticated plot to separate indigenous people from their lands.

As complex as the power dynamics illustrated in this film are, you can understand why Martel’s first nonfiction film might not register as formally inventive as her narrative masterpieces. The search for “truth” is a slippery enough concept as is, without adding the ambiguity of experimental film techniques. Documenting the high-stakes Chocobar trial and unraveling the state’s deceptions requires a certain amount of linear and coherent storytelling, which Martel has traditionally resisted in her films. Nuestra Tierra’s stylistic flourishes—the satellites, drones, and sonic atmosphere—don’t overwhelm so much as complement the Chuchagasta community’s personal archive, which needed the room to speak for itself. It’s hard to know what justice looks like for the community. Chocobar’s killers were convicted and given lengthy sentences, but were ultimately released after just two years. Amín later died from Covid. But Nuestra Tierra is bigger than one case. It’s about preserving the history of Argentina, told by those who were conquered, and supporting the ongoing struggle for indigenous survival. Martel’s filmmaking here is intentionally straightforward and precise, wielding careful storytelling as a cudgel against the bludgeoning power of the state, in order to credibly represent and affirm the existence of a history and culture that has been “officially” denied. It hardly seems like a concession considering what’s at stake.