Landmarks

In October 2009, Javier Chocobar, a member of the Indigenous Chuchagasta community in northwest Argentina’s Tucumán Province, tried to defend himself and his people from being forcibly evicted from their land by a local landowner and two former police officers. As a result, the 68-year-old man was shot and killed, and two other community members were wounded. In her expansive and enlightening first feature documentary, Argentinean filmmaker Lucrecia Martel (Zama, 2017) takes a sweeping approach to this tragic true story, triangulating the murder trial of the three men, the lives of Chocobar and his fellow Chuchagasta people, and the centuries-old, colonialist legacy of land and property theft across Latin America. With a ravishing, at times vertiginous visual approach to filming the natural beauty of the contested land, Martel pays cinematic tribute to people whom others systematically tried to erase from history.

(Synopsis courtesy of New York Film Festival)

Born in Salta, Argentina, Lucrecia Martel is a film director and screenwriter whose work has received international acclaim. Her debut film LA CIÉNAGA (The Swamp, 2001) was followed by LA NIÑA SANTA (The Holy Girl, 2004), LA MUJER SIN CABEZA (The Headless Woman, 2008) and ZAMA (2017), all considered major works of contemporary cinema.

NUESTRA TIERRA (Landmarks, 2025) is her fifth film and the first non-fiction work of her career.

Retrospectives of her work have been presented at numerous cultural and academic institutions, including Harvard, MoMA, Lincoln Center, Cambridge, London’s Tate Museum, and Centre Pompidou in Paris. These were often accompanied by a series of masterclasses on sound and narrative that Martel has offered worldwide and that have been published in several editions. In 2023, she was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Buenos Aires, the National University of Salta in Argentina, and KU Leuven in Belgium.

Her other works include art installations, television series, and short films. Among the most recent are the art installation EL PASAJE (The Passage, 2021); the musical stand-alone episode TERMINAL NORTE (North Terminal, 2021), starring Julieta Laso; and the short films AI (2019) and CAMARERA DE PISO (Maid, 2022).