The new documentary by Lucrecia Martel assembles courtroom scenes, aerial shots, and personal footage to examine a violent confrontation over territory in northern Argentina. Rather than presenting a tidy procedural, the film treats the events surrounding the killing of Javier Chocobar as a window into persistent disputes over land and identity. Through a careful mix of raw materials and editorial choices, Martel makes a case that this single crime is bound to a much older history of encroachment and dispossession.
At its center is the 2009 attack on the Chuschagasta community after a conflict over access to a quarry, when landowner Darío Amín and two former police officers entered Indigenous territory with firearms. That violence culminated in Chocobar’s death on October 12, a date loaded with colonial resonance in Argentina. The legal reckoning that unfolded years later — including court hearings in 2018 — produced convictions for the three men implicated, but Martel’s film digs into the larger social and bureaucratic fractures that made the killing possible.
Martel’s cinematic strategy
Rather than adopting a standard investigative voice, Martel treats the material like an excavation: she layers unvarnished material and formal techniques to reveal context and texture. The film moves between cellphone footage shot during the attack, long observational takes in court, and expansive aerial shots created with drone footage. Those choices create contrast between the intimate immediacy of eyewitness video and the detached overview of surveillance-like images. Editors Jerónimo Pérez Rioja and Miguel Schverdfinger help shape these collisions into a sustained argument, letting evidence and emotion coexist without sentimentalizing the victims.
Aerial perspective as commentary
Martel deploys the drone not as a decorative device but as a thematic instrument: at times it reads like a surveyor’s lens, at others like an invading gaze that echoes colonial mapping. A striking sequence in which a bird collides with a camera sends the device tumbling to earth, an arresting metaphor for ecological and human consequences when outside forces claim a landscape. These overhead views, oscillating between clinical measurement and intrusive voyeurism, help the film stage a debate about who has the right to see and to own land.
Immersion in the trial
Complementing the aerial work is an embedded, near-verité approach to courtroom proceedings. Martel’s camera sits in the room as testimonies unspool, and the film preserves procedural sound — the staccato of transcription machines, the shuffle of papers, the low murmur of witnesses — to construct a dense soundscape of legal theater. The inclusion of the unedited cellphone footage of the incident is harrowing: fragmented imagery, panicked audio, and the very limitations of the device make the violence more tactile, resisting the neat narrative comforts of many crime shows.
Themes and lasting impact
Underlying the film is a clear engagement with colonial continuities. Martel draws parallels between sixteenth-century Spanish colonization and modern-day land disputes, arguing that dispossession has both historical depth and contemporary consequences. The documentary questions whether official records and state recognition adequately represent communities like the Chuschagasta community, whose historical claims are often reduced to bureaucratic ambiguity. Rather than elevating Chocobar into an abstract symbol, Martel treats him as a person surrounded by family and neighbors, allowing viewers to feel the stakes of the loss without turning it into spectacle.
Since its premiere at the 2026 Venice Film Festival, the film has been discussed in festival coverage and critical dispatches for its uncompromising gaze and formal inventiveness. Distributor Strand Releasing opened the film starting May 1, and reactions have emphasized how the work merges elements of true crime with a broader ethnographic and historical inquiry. Whether received as a forensic study, an elegy, or a political document, Martel’s film insists that one violent incident cannot be understood apart from decades — even centuries — of contest over soil, memory, and authority.