Director Lucrecia Martel airs new documentary at Venice festival

Argentine director Lucrecia Martel unveiled her latest documentary at the Venice Film Festival this week, a film about the murder of the leader of the indigenous Chuschagasta community in northern Argentina.

Nuestra tierra (“Our Land”), screening out of competition, is one of a dozen Latin American proposals programmed in the 82nd edition of the international film festival.

Basing her film on the trial of those suspected of carrying out the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar in Tucumán, Lucrecia Martel paints a portrait of the Chuschagasta community, telling a much broader story which tackles issues like memory, identity and social justice.

Martel – who this week denounced "racism" as "a very deep problem and a huge obstacle in Argentine culture" – explained at a press conference last Sunday that she had decided to investigate the case "to try and understand its origin – what permits a human being to feel that they have the legitimacy to pull out a revolver and shoot certain people."

Using multiple images from the archives, Martel tells the story of ordinary men and women who one day left to travel to Buenos Aires to make a living and also of those who stayed behind in the north to defend the land of their ancestors where they were born.

In a firm voice, Martel encouraged creators "to take risks."

"It’s indispensable that ... we don’t stop running the historical risk of approaching others in order to try and understand them and via those others our countries and ourselves," she maintained, admitting that she might "have committed errors" when making her film.

"The calm I have is that if all else fails, we have an archive of the past and the photos which that community possessed so that perhaps they will last a bit longer than the other communities will probably last," pointed out the director.