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.

The murder was captured on video, and when Martel came across it, she realised that “there was a man who had gone there to film and had a revolver, and it struck me as terribly relevant, as someone who works with images and sound, to investigate it,” the Argentine filmmaker explained in an interview with AFP in Venice.

“It was exactly connected to something that deeply concerns me: racism in Argentina,” adds Martel, 58, who hails from Salta in the northwest.

Martel, who 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."

Without a narrator and using a wealth of archival footage, it is the members of the Chuschagasta community themselves who tell their story.

Men and women who once migrated to Buenos Aires in search of a livelihood, and others who remained behind, assert their rights over the land of their birth – the land of their ancestors.

Challenge

However, getting people to speak out was at times a challenge. One of the participants took 10 years to trust her and share her photographs.

“They are people who have been let down by every government, of all political leanings – by the university, by academics, by hippies,” explains the director of Zama.

“With all the disillusionment they’ve experienced from the urban world, why would they trust me?” she asks.

Another challenge she faced while making the film was confronting her own prejudices.

“So many times, I was fixated on getting documents and photos, without properly understanding that I was dealing with a person, a family who had lost one of their own, and I wasn’t being sensitive to that,” she acknowledges.

Through their testimony, the members of the community highlight a history that remains untold and largely ignored by institutions.

“All presidents, from [Raúl] Alfonsín to today, have said at some point that Argentina is a country made of immigrants. As always, they forget the Indigenous peoples,” Martel points out.

Still, she insists she did not set out to tackle the issue of identity, even though it features in the film.

“I don’t believe in identity – I think it’s a trap that forces people into being something they don’t even know,” she argues. “Identity isn’t something fixed – it’s a much more complex phenomenon than the name we’ve given it and the way we’ve defined it,” she adds.

‘Take risks’

Before finishing, Martel voiced a renewed appeal to younger filmmakers: “Don’t lose your energy or faith in what we do – cinema is something incredibly powerful in an age where humanity feels hopeless.”

In a firm voice, she 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.