At the beginning of Lucrecia Martel’s first feature-length documentary, Landmarks, we’re presented with satellite images of Earth. From this zoomed out perspective, there are no countries, borders, or people within view, only water, land, and atmosphere clouding the globe. This simplistic view from outer space could allude to the “new frontier” that President John F. Kennedy was referring to in his “We choose to go to the Moon speech” or the “final frontier” from Star Trek, but what usually happens to wide, open, unmarked pieces of land? It’s a tale as old as time. They are surveyed, divided, and claimed, eventually mapped into ownership and transformed into resources. It doesn’t matter who was rightfully there first; it matters who can conquer and control the land.
Landmarks deals with the question of land ownership in Martel’s native Argentina on a micro and macro level. On one hand, the film is about the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar, a member of the Indigenous Chuchagasta community in northwest Argentina’s Tucumán Province who was shot and killed while peacefully resisting eviction by a local landowner and two former police officers. On the other hand, the documentary chronicles Argentina’s historic attempts to silence its Indigenous communities at large. There is no question that Chocobar was murdered; there is literal video evidence after all, but his case was delayed nearly nine years. Martel, who found out about the murder on YouTube, and co-writer María Alché started communicating with historians and specialists in 2012. They subsequently researched land claim cases that involved deeds and property maps, and fought for funding.
Martel burrows deep into the fabric of the Argentinian judicial system during the 2018 trial. There is a noticeable difference in temperaments during the case. Chuchagasta members sit quietly, clearly pained by this traumatizing experience while the defendants Darío Luis Amín, Luis Humberto Gómez, and José Valdivieso take up space with their big personalities. They lean into their machismo attitudes as if the courtroom were a football pitch where the biggest and most dramatic performance wins favor from the referee. The trial very clearly functions as a microcosm of Argentina itself, where Indigenous communities like Chuchagasta are treated as second-class citizens and forced to navigate a system designed to exclude them. The most unforgivable aspect of this trial is that the three defendants are guilty, yet they claim they aren’t murderers. They act as if they should be absolved of their crimes simply because they owned a title to the land and were “home” when the murder occurred. The fact that there even is a trial says more about modern Argentina than any legal deed or document.
It’s common practice for documentaries to employ reenactments, but Landmarks takes this tradition one step further by including judicially administered reenactments that are not specific to the documentary. These exercises are less about discovering the truth — everyone already knows what happened — than about satisfying bureaucratic procedure. Their repetition of violence functions less as clarification than as a ritualized replay of the crime. The community has to witness the horror again. Martel and cinematographer Ernesto de Carvalho capture these reenactments with a birds-eye-view. They use drone shots, close-ups, and extreme wide angles to show the film viewer the absurdity of these reenactments, and thus reclaim a medium often wielded by local authorities. In doing so, they expose not only the violence, but also the racist rhetoric embedded in the judicial process.
Martel has never shied away from depicting labor on screen. She records everything during the trial, including coffee service. In one montage, the banality of clerks shuffling papers is intercut with the delivery of cappuccinos and orange juices, which Martel folds seamlessly into the flow of the trial, as if they were as essential as the legal proceedings themselves. This attention to labor, especially who serves it and who drinks it, has long been central to Martel’s cinema. In La Ciénaga, domestic workers, who are all Indigenous women, maintain order amid the chaos of a crumbling bourgeois household while the owners of the estate refer to the young women as “savages.” In her short film Maid, Martel again approaches domestic labor with such seriousness that an ordinary housekeeping shift unfolds with the tension of a thriller. Martel insists on the dignity of everyday labor, and the Indigenous people who often take these jobs.
This undercurrent of labor places the Chuchagasta community within the larger scope of Argentinian culture. Indigenous communities have been relegated to the margins of labor, education, and everyday life, so much so that their image has almost effectively been excluded from Argentinian history. The job Martel takes on here is to correct this racist image through her nonfiction framing. Developing trust with Chuchagasta members took time primarily because Argentinian history is often written as fantasy and fiction that villainizes and scapegoats Indigenous communities, but Martel carefully cultivates a close rapport in order to negate said images. She uses the trial as a case study and then weaves montages of family photos, first-person interviews, and current footage of the community into the backbone of the documentary. These images and collective narratives situate Chocobar and his community in a new, necessary light. Martel, who archived every family photo and interview with permission, is effectively creating a new record with Landmarks that will hopefully counter the historical rhetoric that haunts Indigenous communities across Argentina to this day.
Published as part of NYFF 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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