Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks)

In October 2009, Javier Chocobar, a member of the Indigenous Chuchagasta community in northwest Argentina’s Tucumán Province, tried to defend himself and his people from being forcibly evicted from their land by a local landowner and two former police officers. As a result, the 68-year-old man was shot and killed, and two other community members were wounded. In her expansive and enlightening first feature documentary, the great Argentinean filmmaker Lucrecia Martel (Zama) takes a sweeping approach to this tragic true story, triangulating the murder trial of the three men, the lives of Chocobar and his fellow Chuchagasta people, and the centuries-old, colonialist legacy of land and property theft across Latin America. With a ravishing, at times vertiginous visual approach to filming the natural beauty of the contested land, Martel pays cinematic tribute to people whom history has systematically tried to erase.