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Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2025 Venice Film Festival. Strand Releasing opens the film starting Friday, May 1.
It’s hard to stop thinking about Lucrecia Martel‘s gutting true-crime documentary “Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks),” long in the works and about the 2009 murder of an Argentine Indigenous leader, after you’ve seen it. And to call it true crime at all feels like a pitiful, prescriptive, catch-all response to the ambitions of the movie, her first feature-length documentary after fiction films like “The Headless Woman,” “La Cienaga,” and “Zama” (which almost took her down) pulled back the veil on her relationship to her country’s fraught colonial history. But if a documentary that mixes cell-phone footage that feels ripped out of a found-footage horror movie with procedural courtroom red tape and testimony isn’t true true crime, I don’t know what is.
“Nuestra Tierra,” which began around the time the 2018 court hearings began for the murder of Javier Chocobar by three mining entrepreneurs who stepped on his community’s land with firearms and a false sense of ownership, also makes the case that drone footage, which feels so overdone on Netflix crime documentaries and threatens to erase the feeling of an actual human being at the storytelling’s wheel, actually works. Martel jettisons multiple drones into the sky overlooking the Chuschagasta native landscape in northern Argentina, acquiring the effect first of zoomed-in satellite footage, then of something more voyeuristic and frightening, adopting the viewpoint of colonialism itself.
At one point, a bird crashes into the aerial camera, sending the device swirling down to Earth like a meteor bent on a crash land. It’s an on-the-nose image for the nature-.vs.-man argument at the core of “Nuestra Tierra,” and said nature’s resistance to man’s encroachment, but it sends a sharp shock down the spine of “Nuestra Tierra” which at times can seem as deceptively trivial as court TV.
Martel traces the parallels to Spain’s colonization of Argentina in the 16th century, where Spaniards imposed their language and customs onto the Indigenous population while also stripping the land for resources. Similarly, on a more microcosmic level, white landowner Darío Amín showed up to the Chuschagasta territory in 2009 with former police officers Luis Humberto Gómez and Eduardo José Valdivieso seeking access to the community’s quarry. An armed confrontation led to Amín murdering Javier Chocobar, one of the Chuschagasta’s most respected, and injuring several other Indigenous people in the process.
The 2018 trial led to a fractious battle between the Chuschagasta and Amín’s colleagues, with character witnesses brought in to suggest the entrepreneurs had no intention of taking lives. Presciently, disturbingly, Chocobar’s murder occurred on October 12, a day commemorated in Argentina as the start of Spanish colonialism in the Americas. It would be a disservice to “Nuestra Tierra” to suggest that Martel had some of the film’s trenchant parallels handed to her, but, as they say, you can’t make this stuff up. And clearly, you don’t have to.
Martel and editors Jerónimo Pérez Rioja and Miguel Schverdfinger are not coy about incorporating the unedited cellphone footage of Chocobar’s killing, taken by Amín himself. It’s harrowing, horrifying, and hard to parse, obscured by the technology’s limitations at the time but also the sights and sounds of running, screaming, and death, distorted by a visual choppiness you are almost grateful to have.
The access granted by the filmmakers embedding themselves in the trial — where the judge defends the right for journalists to be there — rivals that footage’s immediacy. The manic tapping of stenos, the sounds of shuffling feet, and the rustles of discomfort in the room as the Chuschas rouse to defend one of their beloved leaders all contribute to a surreal, horror movie-like soundscape. When sepia-tinged archival photos of Chuschas are shown as part of the film’s many weaving, generation-spanning montages, Martel and her audio department vent in the clacking of shovels, the sound of dirt heaving upon dirt, the sounds, in other words, of labor and exploitation occuring over years.
Martel and her team faced resistance in acquiring historical documents and access to state agencies — the nature of whether Argentina recognizes Chuschagasta as a legitimate community at all is even fuzzy. But Martel cuts through the white noise of unanswered questions and uncertainties with those drone cameras that turn audiences into voyeurs of someone else’s Earth. “Nuestra Tierra,” or “Landmarks” per its vaguer English-language subtitle, ponders how far back we have to go in history to legitimize an undervalued group of people (the Chuschagasta population dates back at least a thousand years or more).
But you don’t have to span too far back in time to realize threats from centuries ago are still at stake. There’s no spoiler in revealing that all three men implicated in the murder of Javier Chocobar were convicted by the trial’s end. None are in prison anymore, and few English-language news reports even exist about the murder today. Martel’s film ultimately makes Chocobar not a national symbol of Indigenous struggle but a real human, with people who loved him and whom he loved, regardless of that fact. And she makes the case that the Chuschas put up a hard-won, long-won, impossible battle that already began centuries before, coming at the material with a visceral filmmaking point of view that never overshadows the material. Even when it’s looking over it all like a drone in the sky about to fall down.
Grade: A-
“Nuestra Tierra” premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. Strand Releasing opens the film starting Friday, May 1.
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