EXCLUSIVE: Argentina’s 58th President, Alberto Fernández, isn’t particularly well-regarded at home. During his tenure, he oversaw historic economic woes and is currently on trial for Presidential corruption. Abroad, his stock is even lower, with most people associating him with a series of comments he made on a trip to Spain in 2021.
“The Mexicans came from the Indians, the Brazilians came from the jungle, but we Argentines came from the ships. And they were ships that came from Europe,” Fernández said. He later apologized for the comments, which were widely condemned as racist. The offensive tetraptych also sparked a furious regional debate about Argentinians, who have long had a reputation in Latin America for regarding themselves as distinct from other Latin nations because of the large percentage of the country’s population that traces its ancestry to European settlers, mainly from Spain and Italy.
Argentina was, of course, not born a homogeneous state. Like its neighbors, at its inception, Argentina had a significant Black population, descended from enslaved West Africans brought to the continent on many of the same ships Fernández mentioned. Before that, an indigenous population occupied the land with their own distinct languages, religions, and economies, many of which still exist today despite decades of brutal crackdowns from the Argentinian state.
This is “the craziness of the culture of white Latin America,” Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel tell us passionately through an interpreter. A craziness that she explores in her exceptional documentary feature, Landmarks (Nuestra Tierra), which debuted this week at Venice. The film will play TIFF on Monday before screening at the Camden, New York, and London Film Festivals. You can series an exclusive clip from the film above.
Constructed over nearly a decade, the film explores the violent strategies used by the Argentinian state to grab territory from the country’s indigenous Chuschagasta community. The film is shaped around the legal trial of three state officers charged with the murder of a young Chuschagasta man named Javier Chocobar. The Chocobar incident was a high-profile case in Argentina. The murder was caught on video. The footage shows a state official and two accomplices attempting to evict members of the indigenous Chuschagasta community from their land in northern Argentina. Claiming ownership of the land and armed with guns, they kill Chocobar. After nine years of protests, court proceedings on the case were finally opened in 2018.
Martel says she first constructed the idea for Landmarks while shooting her last feature, Zama (2017), a superb exploration of Argentina’s colonial history through the story of a fictional Spanish magistrate who languishes at a colonial outpost to which he has been relegated.
“They were two parallel ideas developed together,” Martel says, adding that it took her much longer to bring Landmarks to the screen due to “many years of research, looking and sorting out all the archives and the pictures of the indigenous families to create the story.”
“I also needed the time to stay in the community,” Martel says. “This was a real obstacle. The community doesn’t trust easily, especially when people are just coming and asking for things.”
Martel says she received the most archive material during her last few months of production from an older Chuschagasta woman who, many years earlier, at the start of the process, told her there were no useful materials to be found in the community.
“In the end, she gave me a box with hundreds of pictures and archive materials that go all the way back to the beginning of the century that belonged to her family,” Martel says.
With all this material, the question remains: How do you best present it to an audience? The final result in Landmarks is bold and ambitious. Martel stitches together archival photographs and letters with footage from the real-life criminal trial alongside intimate interviews with members of the Chuschagasta community. The visual language Martel has created allows the film to remain nimble, almost elusive, in her traditional fashion, while remaining accessible to audiences.
A significant portion of the film also features footage shot using drones, a choice that audiences perhaps wouldn’t expect from a filmmaker like Martel, whose cinema is best known for its dedication to life’s subtleties. The veteran filmmaker said she was inspired by the Argentinian state’s decision to recreate the Chocobar incident using drones.
“They didn’t do it because it was so important for the authorities to get clarity or anything like that. It was because the prosecution office had acquired new drones,” Martel says. “They just wanted to test them. It was totally absurd.”
For the Chuschagasta people, the drones became a symbol of surveillance and state power, which Martel says was important to challenge by launching her own flying cameras into the sky to capture the indigenous view of the events.
“It was about turning it upside down and giving the other version, the other perspective,” Martel says.
Martel speaks passionately about using her lens to not only highlight the voices of Argentina’s indigenous community, but also provide them with the power to create their own reality.
“The very fact that I am the one who is telling this story and not an indigenous person is evidence that access to filmmaking and history has belonged to the white population,” Martel says. “So it was very important for me to tell this story without trying to take the first-person position as a storyteller.”
Landmarks will go a long way in correcting Argentina’s history books and challenging contemporary ideas about Argentinian identity. For this part, it will likely be a controversial work within the country, where the far-right President Javier Milei continually advances attacks on indigenous rights. Last year, Milei also shut down Argentina’s national cinema funding body, INCAA, to kill dissenting projects like Landmarks.
“I’m from a region in Argentina with the highest presence of indigenous people, so this is a theme that has been present all my life,” Martel says when quizzed about the prospect of releasing Landmarks in Milei’s Argentina.
“No government has ever really devoted itself to finding a solution to the problem of the lands belonging to the indigenous people. But this government is perhaps the least sensitive over the last 30 or 40 years. This is why I had to tell this story and protect this film.”
She adds: “It is important work.”
Venice ends tomorrow. Check out an exclusive clip from Landmarks above.
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