But for decades, as some of Martel’s interviewees note, their presence on the land has come under threat from the Amíns of the world: we hear about specious claims of ownership, attempted evictions, exploitation of Indigenous labor, and frequent seizures of land, livestock, and crops. (We also hear of the Chuschagasta activists’ efforts to resist by filing lawsuits, leading to years of protracted legal and bureaucratic tedium.) Martel’s film places these events within the context of a systemic dehumanization and erasure of Indigenous people across all aspects of Argentinean life. In one scene, a church tour guide speaks of a mural that depicts Tucumán’s Indigenous warriors as bloodthirsty raiders of civilization, righteously struck down only by divine intervention—as if, one listener says, “even God wants to erase us for good.”
Amín, Gómez, and Valdivieso were brought to trial in 2018, nine years after Chocobar’s death—an astonishing delay. Still, a justice of sorts did eventually arrive: all three defendants were convicted and imprisoned. Though they had a brief reprieve after a successful appeal, in 2020, their conviction was eventually upheld, and Goméz and Valdivieso returned to prison in 2025. (Amín died from COVID in 2021.) Much of “Our Land” is devoted to the trial, and Martel crosscuts between the film’s two strands, community panorama and legal drama, putting them into sharply dialectical play. Her sly implication is that there is more truth to be excavated from memories and off-the-cuff accounts than from official documents and public hearings.
It’s in the trial footage, though, that Martel exerts her signature formal acumen most forcefully. She duly captures the entitled bloviations of the accused, who frame themselves, unsurprisingly and unpersuasively, as the victims. Pointedly, though, the film continually lingers on the faces of Chuschagasta community members seated toward the back of the courtroom, reacting mostly in silence, and often with tears, to witness testimony. The very layout of the room becomes a microcosmic vision of larger social inequities: privileged Argentineans in a noisy position of dominance, Indigenous men and women positioned quietly at the margins. Here and there, Martel singles out the mundane practicalities of courtroom activities: a man cleaning a table, another serving beverages. The inherent dignity of work, especially work that typically goes unnoticed, is anything but incidental to the film’s concerns.
Martel has an interest in letting the seams show, and in questioning the mechanics behind cinematic conventions. Throughout “Our Land,” she and the director of photography, Ernesto de Carvalho, make use of a drone-borne camera to take in the vast, sun-baked expanse of Tucumán. Notably, though, they don’t simply employ landscape shots as filler, as is de rigueur for so many documentaries. We’re never allowed to forget that the drone is a drone; we’re reminded by the robotic swivelling movements of the camera, and by the loud, whirring noise of the machine that Martel, a master of sound design, refuses to omit. It’s not lost on her that drone technology has long been an instrument of surveillance and warfare; she has appropriated the eyes of neocolonialism in order to gouge them out. In one shrewdly unredacted moment, the drone gets knocked sideways by a bird, sending the camera off balance—and suggesting that, one way or another, the invader will be removed.
“Our Land” is the work of a great filmmaker exploring the boundaries of a relatively unfamiliar form. “The Headless Woman,” Martel’s richly suggestive drama from 2009, finds her in full, terrifying command of a medium whose limitations—the edges of the frame, and of perception itself—become the very foundations on which the story and its many mysteries rest. (A gorgeous 4K restoration produced by Rei Pictures, with support from the Museum of Modern Art and the U.C.L.A. Film & Television Archive, will screen May 3rd, 8th, and 17th at Metrograph.) Early on in the film, Vero (María Onetto), a wealthy middle-aged white woman, drives down a winding road through Salta, alongside a bone-dry canal. Briefly taking her eyes off the road to answer her phone, she runs over something, perhaps two somethings. She stops the car, glances at her side-view mirror, and, for a moment, seems to register what she’s done—and then she retrieves her sunglasses, which fell during the impact, and drives ahead. She doesn’t look back, though the camera does; we see a dog lying dead behind her. We also know, from earlier in the film, that there were three Indigenous boys playing with a dog in the area.
