Lucrecia Martel: ‘Filmmakers have the best tools – cheaper and more potent than missiles’

There are films which do not seek to order the world but to make it stranger. Lucrecia Martel’s new film, Nuestra tierra (“Our world), belongs in a place beyond any comfort zones – it is a documentary which does not limit itself to reconstructing the facts; it brings the tools whereby we are accustomed to understand them into crisis. ​

In her expedition into the documentary genre, Martel does not abandon her territory but rather expands it. Perception as a battlefield, sound as a way of thinking, images as instruments of interrogation rather than evidence. 

What then appears onscreen is not only a case – the film explores the murder of indigenous chief Javier Chocobar and the territorial claims of his Chuschagasta community – but a broader question over who is narrating the story, from what standpoint and with what degree of belief what they are seeing. 

The project has taken over a decade of work and was assembled as a web of materials, registers and formal decisions, which block any illusion of transparency. Where the court records seem to offer certainties, the film introduces doubts; where the archives promise objectivity, suspicions appear. With such displacement, Martel again takes cinemas in an uncomfortable but necessary place: that of an experience which obliges people to think.

Singular voice, new territory

Martel moves to the territory of documentaries after constructing some of the most singular films of contemporary Argentina cinema: La ciénaga (“The wetlands”), La niña santa (“The holy little girl”), La mujer sin cabeza (“The headless woman”) and Zama. 

Nuestra Tierra is the culmination of 14 years of research and originates from a video found while creating her last work of fiction. From that point on, Martel committed to the construction of a vast archive, writing the film up together with actor, director and screenwriter María Alché and a formal quest which, far from finding transparency, installed a friction between image, sound and narrative. 

At the heart of the film are the claims of the Chuschagasta people for their ancestral lands and for the justice still awaited by the Chocobar family. The film does not limit itself to registering a case – it proposes an experience which disarms certainties and obliges us to rethink the relationship between perception, truth and narrative. As Martel herself would later say in our interview: “I’m trying precisely to explore a cinematic song, we might say.” 

“This is a film in which the spectators permit us to take them from their seats to beautiful places, while they hear beautiful words, and once in a while land up in a trial which does not seem real but acted out,” she said. “Until now, and judging from the comments of the public, it would seem that we have achieved that. [And] If the spectator has doubts, there are many places where the comments of the public can be sought.”

Many of your films look at the roots of a society – class, colonialism, land, etc. – rather than the immediate symptoms. Do you feel that we are undergoing a kind of collapse of civilisation as we have known it, or rather a time when those historic bases have been exposed?

I definitely believe that we are witnessing the twilight of an empire – the United States – and its fading naturally overlaps with a period when humanity as a whole understands that the progress which has brought us here was a narrow corridor leading to the abyss and we do not want to fall. We’re afraid of the apocalypse but in the bottom of our hearts we think that we can still perhaps dodge it. 

I would say that we have reached the day before saying: ‘That’s enough, guys, not this way, no to war, to massacring entire peoples, to ruining the planet, to poverty when technology can do all that but it can also help us to move in the direction of salvation, not extinction.’ 

That’s what I think on days when I am optimistic.

In a world where conflicts for land, resources or identities appear ever cruder, what do you think defines injustice nowadays? How do you recognise it when it has been taken for granted for so much time?

Your question is very exact, because it’s no longer about knowing whether something is unjust or not but whether we have the capacity to notice it and whether noticing it moves us to action of some kind. Well, here is where cinema shows up in all its splendour. 

In a world fed up with ponderous forms of language reordered by mathematical operations with its responses balanced according to probability, cinema comes along to offer heart – the symphonic capacity to provoke thoughts via images and sounds. 

A great effort must be made but with images and sounds and without words, we can get to recognise injustice again. Nuestra Tierra makes that bet.

Much of public debate today seems reduced to rapid gestures, viralised images or immediate stances. How can you film or narrate an injustice in a world where gestures often replace reflection?

We are going to grow tired of cheap shots and strident screams if we are not already weary. We need to return to nocturnal whispers where the best ideas appear, recalling the pleasure of thinking without being overwhelmed by the absurd substitute of urgent news. Whoever returns from the world of screaming and the self-imposed requirement of responding to meaningless messages or clicking “likes” to tiny-minded ideas – whoever follows that path is unlikely to turn back. It is possible to inhabit this planet in other ways, that’s the adventure.

How do you construct a film which can speak out from a very specific place and at the same time resonate within a global context?

The universal, which has always been required of us, is simply the sacrifice which all cultures must make to the Western powers. There is no such thing as universal, it’s just a requirement. We humans recognise ourselves by our own details, we don’t need anybody to measure us to find equivalents and averages. 

In this film our focus for many years has been to look for historical documents immediately related to the valley of Choromoros. If you look for that place in Google Earth, you will see that in Tucumán Province there is a river called Choromoro with the River Vipos flowing a few kilometres to the south of it while the Ruta Nacional 9 highway runs east with a rugged zone, the Calchaquí hills, to be found to the west. We concentrated on the latter place, telling their story with the voices of Tucumán people. 

We have screened this film in a great many countries, winning prizes and mentions. That’s understandable. The requirement of universality is a colonial fallacy.

Faced with the crisis in cultural industries and the technological changes, where do you feel the future of cinema lies today?

Wherever I go, I try to meet young students of cinema. I have more faith in the students of cinema for the work of saving the planet than in the most conspicuous authorities of any country. When we filmmakers understand that we have the best tools, cheaper and more potent than all the missiles fired in recent days, at that point we will start stepping back from the abyss. I’m convinced of that and working in that direction. For that we need to be healthy and happy. 

Fortunately microphones and cameras are within reach of an enormous percentage of humanity every day. We therefore invite them to become part of the cinema community and end this madness.

What still moves you as a narrator?

Our work is not to substitute one argument with another, our work is to create the conditions of perception so that an argument can be observed with other eyes and ears, revealing what we have ceased to see as being wretched or magnificent in it. That’s a really beautiful job.