Lucrecia Martel: "They forget about indigenous peoples"

In Our Land , her latest documentary presented at the Venice Film Festival, filmmaker Lucrecia Martel champions the rights of indigenous people and once again denounces racism in her native Argentina, with a film that speaks to domination, memory, and migration.

Based on the trial of the suspects in the murder of Javier Chocobar, which occurred in Tucumán in 2009 , Martel paints a portrait of the Chuschagasta community, threatened with being dispossessed of the lands they inhabit, and tells a much broader story that addresses themes such as memory and racism.

The murder was captured on video, and when Martel found it, she realized that "it was a guy who had gone to film and had a revolver, and it seemed terribly pertinent to me, as someone who works with images and sound, to investigate it," the Argentine filmmaker explained during an interview with AFP in Venice.

"And also because it had exactly to do with what concerns me greatly: racism in Argentina," says Martel, 58, a native of Salta, in the northwest.

Without a narrator's voice and with a multitude of archival images, the members of the Chuschagasta community themselves tell their story. Men and women who once migrated to Buenos Aires to make a living, and others who stayed, claiming their rights to the land of their birth, the land of their ancestors.

However, getting people to speak out was sometimes a challenge. It took ten years for one of the participants to trust her and show her their photos. These are "people who have been disappointed by all governments, all political parties; by universities, by academics, by hippies," explains the director of Zama .

"With all the disappointments they have in the urban world, why would they trust me?" he asks.

Another challenge he had to deal with when making Our Land , out of competition at the Mostra, was his own "prejudices."

"So many times I was worried about getting documents and photos, without fully understanding what a person, a family, had lost a member of their family, without being sensitive about it," she admits.

With their story, community members highlight an untold history largely ignored by institutions. "Every president, from [Raúl] Alfonsín to today, has a quote (...) in which they said that Argentina is made up of migrants. As always, they forget about the Indigenous peoples," Martel points out.

Still, she didn't seek to address the theme of identity, even though it's present in the film, she emphasizes. "I don't believe in identity; I think it's a trap that forces people to do something they don't know how to do," she maintains. "Identity isn't something fixed; it's a more complex phenomenon than the name we've given it and the way we've defined it," she adds.

Martel took more than fifteen years to make this documentary , and he admits he may have made "mistakes." But at least, he says, the documentary will remain forever. And that's saying something.

"Let's suppose the film is a complete mistake, that it's useless, that I completely misunderstood the community's problems. At least the photos and documents were scanned; they're organized and have them on a disk," he notes.

Before concluding, Martel reiterates a call to his younger colleagues, "not to lose strength or faith in what we do: cinema is something very powerful in a time of hopeless humanity."