Lucrecia Martel: I miss the representations of ourselves

Back in 2010, Argentina’s most internationally renowned filmmaker Lucrecia Martel was browsing YouTube videos when she suddenly got the chills.  The Salta-born director was looking for footage of unreached indigenous communities, as part of her research for her 2017 period drama Zama, which took place in the 18th century Spanish colony that would later become Argentina.  While browsing, she came across the footage of a crime: the murder of indigenous leader Javier Chocobar in Tucumán. He was shot to death by former police officer and mining entrepreneur Darío Amín in 2009, during a faceoff over ownership of the land where the Chuschagasta indigenous community lives. Two other men from the Chuschagasta community were also shot in the attack.    “I realized I had already seen it,” said Martel to the press on Wednesday. “It was chilling — I couldn’t believe I had forgotten about it. That’s when I began researching.” Martel’s first documentary feature, Landmarks follows the trial for Chocobar’s murder and the life of the Chuschagasta community, as it navigates legal disputes over territory, displacement and the fragile preservation of memory. Combining family photographs, legal files and aerial observational scenes, the film examines how documents and images construct history while also revealing what they actually omit. The project’s timeline stretched across roughly 15 years, during which production overlapped with Martel’s other projects, including Zama, a literary adaptation that premiered at the Venice film festival in 2017. The initial encounter with the video in YouTube, though, remained the documentary’s starting point. While both of Martel’s latest films share thematic echoes, they address different historical moments.  “We built a nation that has repeatedly rejected Indigenous people and their descendants. These are people we know, they live among us. So while there’s a connection with Zama, this film is about today and about the future. Colonialism laid foundations we as a nation have never changed,” she said. The issue, also, is not merely local. As Martel reminded, the conflict that triggered the film — “the murdering of a person who was defending what is traditionally his home”, in her own words — is something that has happened for centuries in this country. In that sense, she said, the current global circumstances are “very telling” of the importance of land.  “We have witnessed how you can obliterate entire towns in order to obtain land, or nations making decisions about other countries with absolutely selfish purposes. The planetary context is pretty revealing of the huge asset land is, and the need for people to defend the place where they live,” she said.    In Argentina, Martel said, the indigenous communities’ struggle for their territory is a continuous problem. “We as a nation cannot drag such an unjust situation endlessly. This condemns us to failure as a country,” she stated. Following the Chuschagasta community’s story over years deepened her perspective on the issue. “I hope the film encourages people to have patience before judging communities claiming land — before assuming they’re opportunists,” she said. “Many moved to cities out of necessity or displacement; migration doesn’t erase their identity or their rights.” Visual decisions reflect that aim of widening perspectives on the matter. When the film crew saw the police using drones for judicial reenactments at the crime scene, they realized that while drones couldn’t capture the human conflict — racism, land disputes, hate — they did reveal the beauty of what’s at stake in that struggle. “That beauty matters,” stressed Martel. “In Argentina we need to reflect on how intolerant we are to the idea of poor people being able to enjoy beauty. We can’t stand it, I don’t know why it’s imprinted in our Argentine nature,” she added.  “The sites Chuschagasta families often choose to build their homes are not what we might choose (thinking of things like water and power supply). Instead, they choose the place that is most beautiful. Perhaps urban planning should learn from that,” she joked. Stories that are not being told Martel’s outspokenly-political fifth film lands amid uncertainty for Argentina’s film industry, which has been particularly targeted by the current administration’s austerity policies. In its latest blow, Javier Milei’s government included inits recently passed labor reform a series of articles that removed the National Institute of Film and Audiovisual Arts’ autonomous source of finance. The articles were later modified, postponing the enforcement of that decision until 2028. “What’s happening with Argentine cinema is truly unfortunate because it’s an industry that generates significant added value,” said Martel when asked about the timeliness of her film’s release. While she said efforts to make administrative spending more reasonable are understandable, she argued reforms should aim to “create jobs, increase film production, expand conversations and diversify perspectives — and that isn’t clear right now.” Santiago Gallelli, one of the film producers from Rei Pictures, said the industry’s main automatic funding mechanism remains at risk and has only been temporarily extended.  “Anyone who produces films knows how long projects take to assemble,” he said. “What the industry needs most is predictability, and today we simply don’t have it.” Since most film production in Argentina now depends on streaming platforms’ money, they determine what stories are told, something that Galelli describes as harmful to an industrial ecosystem built over decades of public investment that has been praised worldwide. “Many people are being left out of this system and so many stories cannot even begin to be told,” he added. In Martel’s view, the weakening of local film production also risks erasing cultural representation. “I miss watching actors,” she said. “I miss seeing Buenos Aires, our cities, those representations of ourselves. Not having that is dangerous,” she added.  The issue is cultural rather than purely economic. Cinema, she said, helps societies understand themselves — “our lives, our cities, even our stupid Argentine habits.” That shared symbolic space, she added, “is what makes a country.”  “That’s why it’s dangerous when a government misunderstands its link to an industry that is also part of our culture. What they are dismantling is also what allows us to understand ourselves not as isolated individuals but as a community.”