‘Nuestra Tierra’ Venice Review: Memory, Justice, and the Killing That Shook a Community

The vision seems cosmic. The world, observed from what looks like a space station, appears before us. As the camera draws closer and closer to Earth, we hear Mercedes Sosa singing the Kyrie that opens Ariel Ramírez’s Misa Criolla. The biblical and immense shifts into the human and everyday when the camera descends onto a small soccer field in the Indigenous community of Chuschagasta, in Tucumán, northern Argentina, and settles on the serene face of a woman watching.

Lucrecia Martel has no intention of making a mystical, Malick-style film, but she does aim, through this contrast between the vast and the intimate, the global and the local, to reveal how a historical logic that has shaped the world for centuries continues to echo in one specific place. Nuestra Tierra is a case study—the 2009 murder of Tucumán leader Javier Chocobar—but also a reflection on the capitalist logic that has long displaced Indigenous people from their lands, or, as in this case, cast doubt on their right to claim even a small piece of the earth as their own.

The case and the public trial could easily have been filmed in a straightforward, televisual style. But the director of La Ciénaga understands that the incident is not only compelling on its own terms but also reveals something fundamental about the very foundations of a nation: its ideas of land, ownership, and justice. This doesn’t mean that Nuestra Tierra is only a political or historical reflection; it is also a human drama unfolding in the here and now, one in which centuries of conflict reverberate.

Chocobar was killed in 2009 in his community when three men, who claimed to hold legal title to the land and sought to exploit it for mining, confronted local residents. The clash escalated violently; shots were fired, and Chocobar was killed. The scene was partially recorded by the perpetrators themselves, footage later replayed during the trial held in Tucumán in 2018.

The courtroom drama drives the narrative—accusations, defenses, reconstructions, confrontations, testimony. Martel films it all with her trademark attention to detail: private conversations, sidelong glances, exchanges that take place off to the side. She also lets us hear from the accused men (Darío Amín, Luis González, Humberto Valdiviezo), their lawyers, as well as Chocobar’s family and witnesses, several of whom were injured during the attack.

Parallel to this, Martel delves into the history of the Chuschagasta community—their migrations, struggles, memories—and their ongoing fight, before and after Chocobar’s death, to have their land rights recognized. These personal stories, often told through family photographs, intertwine with a historical perspective showing how, over centuries, political, economic, and administrative systems have worked in concert to dispossess Indigenous peoples.

Landmarks also surprises with some odd formal choices, notably an inventive, almost playful use of drones that both contextualize the disputed territory and highlight specific details. Another striking choice is the space Martel gives to the accused and their defenders, letting them speak at length. She doesn’t need to rebut them: their own words lay bare a logic that is brutal, patronizing, and racist, inseparable from the darker currents of the province’s history.

Martel has made the wise choice of delivering a film that is clear, accessible, and open, steering away from the increasingly stylized territory into which her career seemed to be heading, particularly with Zama. This isn’t to say that those other approaches were wrong or less valuable, but here, by setting aside almost any trace of formal experimentation, she achieves something different: a film that is at once human, moving, and deeply sensitive, while still retaining the qualities that make her work unique, inventive, and unmistakably personal.

As always with Martel, the magic lies in the details she captures. The widow of Javier Chocobar gradually emerges as the heart of the narrative, recounting the story of her husband through photographs, fragments of memory, and reflections that bind together the personal and the communal. Around her, the collective voice of the Chuschagasta community adds further texture, linking Chocobar’s murder to the broader history of internal migrations within Argentina and to the repeated economic crises that have shaped — and scarred — the country for the past fifty years. Layered into this tapestry are crucial historical insights that allow the audience to better understand the long and painful trajectory of Indigenous peoples across the centuries.

Happily, Martel avoids the trappings of true-crime sensationalism. But the weight of the case and trial remains powerful, exposing a brutality and racism that endure today. Since most of the footage dates from 2018, the film implicitly suggests that, under current political conditions, things have only worsened—and that those responsible now feel no need to hide what they think. In that sense, the lucid, generous clarity of Nuestra Tierra becomes invaluable: it gives voice, calmly but urgently, to communities that have never truly been heard.