Lucrecia Martel’s Our Land revisits the October 2009 killing of Javier Chocobar and the 2018 trial to explore communal land, state power, and enduring resistance
The story that Lucrecia Martel assembles in Our Land (Nuestra Tierra) begins far beyond the scene of the crime and then draws us inward with insistence. From satellite-like aerial views to intimate community gatherings, the film maps both territory and memory while centering the voice of the Chuchagasta community. Martel stages the documentary as a close study of how land is lived and defended: the camera lingers on games beneath a tree, daily labor, and the faces of elders, pairing those images with the cold geometry of the courtroom where justice arrives late. The film’s framing makes clear that the conflict is not merely legal; it is cultural, historical, and moral.
At the heart of the narrative lies a violent confrontation in October 2009 and a delayed legal reckoning that culminated in 2018. The victim, Javier Chocobar, was an elder of the indigenous Chuchagasta community in Tucumán Province, northwest Argentina, killed while resisting an attempted eviction. Footage of the event exists, and Martel interweaves that material with trial excerpts and community testimony to show how privilege and state complicity protected the assailants for years. The documentary insists on the distinction between formal titles and lived possession: while a landowner claimed legal rights, the people who had tended and inhabited the land asserted a deeper, communal claim.
Martel uses visual contrasts as an organizing device. Expansive drone frames and satellite-like shots emphasize scale and context, then the film tightens focus to the slope of a field, the bark of a tree, or the expressions of witnesses. Those choices create a cinematic rhythm in which beauty and violence coexist: the natural world and cultural rituals are shown with tenderness, and the legal apparatus is presented as neutral yet intimidating. Through editing and sound, including the evocative voice of Mercedes Sosa, Martel links sensory experience to memory, making the viewer feel how intimately land shapes identity and community.
The director’s aesthetic decisions function as argument. By placing courtroom footage and recorded defenses by the accused side by side with community interviews, the film exposes the power imbalance: those who claim ownership speak from a position of state-sanctioned authority, while community members offer quiet, stubborn rebuttals. Martel does not lecture; she constructs a visual logic in which the audience completes the moral judgment. The result is a documentary that reads like a civic testimony—an ethical record that refuses to let official narratives erase lived experience.
Central to the film are the testimonies of the Chuchagasta people. Martel foregrounds elders and neighbors who describe their relationship to the land and their desire for communal care. These interviews clarify an important concept: communal land is not an abstract term but a practice of shared stewardship and cultural continuity. By amplifying those voices, the film poses broader questions about property, sovereignty, and who gets to be heard when disputes turn violent. The presence of recorded defenses from the accused—Dario Amin and former police officers Luis Gomez and Eduardo Sassi—further sharpens this contrast.
Though the narrative is rooted in a specific Argentinian place and a particular sequence of events, Martel’s film resonates far beyond Tucumán. Viewers may find parallels with other indigenous struggles and with conflicts over land and resources worldwide. The documentary also arrives at a moment when questions about capitalism, ecological collapse, and state violence are increasingly urgent. Produced by Rei Pictures, Louverture Films, and Piano in co-production with Pio & Co., Lemming Film, and Snowglobe, Our Land has traveled the festival circuit and accumulated honors: it premiered at the 2026 Venice film festival and subsequently received top recognition at the BFI London Film Festival, an award in international competition at Locarno, and a special citation from the National Society of Film Critics.
The film opened to the public on May 1 with a limited release through Strand Releasing, beginning at Film Forum in New York City. That timing, coinciding with May Day, underscores the documentary’s engagement with labor, collective rights, and social struggle. Martel’s filmmaking invites civic attention: it is at once a memorial for those who died defending home and a call to recognize the legal, social, and historical structures that enable dispossession. For viewers seeking a film that combines rigorous reporting with a humane cinematic eye, Our Land (Nuestra Tierra) stands as an essential work.