Lucrecia Martel in Conversation: ‘I Want to Leave This Planet Feeling I Was Useful to Other People’

The space sits on the third floor of the Metro Kinokulturhaus, one of Vienna’s most traditional and charming cinemas, right in the heart of the Austrian capital. Downstairs, in its central hall, there’s a beautiful screening room, a bar, and a bookstore/video library with hundreds of titles for sale. And upstairs is Lucrecia Martel. The staircase connecting the lobby to the third floor is packed with a long line of people hoping to squeeze into a space that clearly holds far fewer. They’re waiting for her Masterclass. Enthusiastic fans—many holding a book about her work recently published by the Viennale, the city’s film festival where she’s presenting Landmarks—line up along with others who visibly just want to hear and meet the director from Salta. The talk begins shortly, and it’s obvious many people won’t get in. There’s no chaos—this is Vienna, after all—but the disappointed faces of those left outside are striking. And the same thing happens after the event: autographs, selfies, conversations, bursts of fan devotion. Martel’s presence in the city—really, in any city—creates a kind of cinephile upheaval.

The aura surrounding the director of La Ciénaga goes far beyond fans. You can feel it in every conversation at the festival, in every casual chat with other filmmakers (“Do you know her? Can you introduce me?”—versions of the same plea in several languages), and even among the organizers, who protect and pamper her at every step. It’s true she inspires a similar devotion in Argentina, but I’m not sure there’s full awareness back home of the level of respect and admiration she receives around the world. At this point, her public talks are almost as sought-after and circulated as her films. Which is why, in parallel with the release of Nuestra tierra, Caja Negra is publishing Un destino común, a book collecting many of her public interventions—talks and seminars that offer a window into the unique philosophy shaping her cinema and, in many ways, her life.

Watching what happens around her, it’s hard not to think about the disconnect between the way local authorities mistreat and disparage Argentine cinema at home and the response it generates globally. If the bureaucrats currently running the INCAA had the slightest idea of the impact Martel has around her—not just her, but every Argentine film moving through the world and many of its filmmakers—they might think twice before saying the nonsense they say about national cinema.

“This whole situation was a slap in the face that shook us all,” Martel says, seated a few hours earlier in a hotel room on the ninth floor, its windows overlooking the center of Vienna. It’s obvious what she’s referring to; no need to spell it out. She’ll return to the topic as our conversation goes on. The filmmaker is in the middle of a tour presenting Landmarks, a film centered on the murder of Indigenous leader Javier Chocobar in Tucumán and the subsequent trial of those responsible. It’s a project that has occupied her mind for 16 years now—the crime dates back to 2009—and on which she worked for more than a decade. A complex and challenging process—her first documentary—it began with a specific case and gradually expanded into an audiovisual reflection on centuries of oppression and mistreatment of Indigenous peoples.

Martel is known for making cinema that is both free and precise. Her films are wide open in their associations yet exact and meticulous in their formal decisions, built on countless elements that converge in surprising, or at least original, ways. A couple of shots by her are unmistakably hers; there’s an enigmatic imprint hovering in that liminal space where obsessive craft meets the magic of what happens in the moment. In that sense, making a documentary means entering a zone that, if not chaotic, is at least harder to control. And that was one of the main challenges of Landmarks: surrendering to chaos.

“Chaos? No,” Martel says. “I wouldn’t know what to do in chaos. What I tried to do at every stage was organize the vastness of our ambitions—what to investigate, how far to go, how to tell the story, from which period to which, with what level of detail. That meant that for many years we researched (together with María Alché) things you can’t even imagine when you watch the film, but that laid its foundations. We hope to publish a book with that research because so many valuable things happened that deserve to be recorded. Think about it this way: even if the film turned out badly, we still built a historical investigation, an archive of all the images and documents the community shared with us. And that remains. So when someone else comes along, they don’t have to start from zero and spend ten years researching. They’ll have all that. One thing I learned with this film is that, beyond oneself, it’s important to leave small bricks behind so others don’t have to start from scratch. That’s not a common mindset in this country. Our political class should think that way—leave things in order so whoever comes next doesn’t begin from zero. Instead, everything is always tabula rasa.”

—Did the research change your views on the subject?
Martel: First of all, it helped me understand that during the colonial process the continent suffered, something very concrete happened 200 years ago: the formation of nation-states and their policies toward our population. What alarms me most is the racism—a completely arbitrary racism—that creates a continuity with colonial rule, only far more illegitimate now. We have a Constitution, and that makes the situation of Indigenous communities and rural families of Indigenous descent even more outrageous. At what point is the national state going to seriously address the legitimacy of private property? If that is supposed to be the backbone of nation-building, when will they deal with it in relation to rural, campesino, Indigenous Argentina? The way colonial property was carried over into private property was utterly arbitrary.

—The drone shots in the film seem to speak to that—the vastness of the land, how much some own and how little others have. Was that intentional, a visual way of expressing what’s at stake?
Martel: If you look at what has been legitimized in the name of private owners and the dispossession many families live under, it’s scandalous. If you animated the territory, you’d see families arriving in a valley at the same time, 200 years passing, and one family now owns everything while the others own nothing. And when you look at who these families are, the only difference is that some are Indigenous and the others aren’t. What is that? They arrived at the same time, fought in the same independence wars, and probably more people died on the Indigenous side. Time passed and everything changed. If you don’t see the humans themselves, it’s inexplicable. And when you do see them, the explanation is atrocious—clearly racial.

—That dynamic also appears in the trial. You see some people talking over others, refusing to listen to community members, as if they also own that space.
Martel: Exactly. And what does Argentine education consist of? That, for me, defines my political position from now on. I’m no longer interested in any Argentine political fantasy, any experiment, unless they explain what they plan to do about education. What I see is an intention not to share the tools with which laws are written—the things you need to understand a legal framework. You have to know how to read, how to interpret. If you deny that to a huge part of the population, that means something. And if, at the same time, you promote an education for the upper classes where the only thing that matters is that your children become friends with judges, become lawyers, befriend public officials—if the education of Argentina’s upper classes consists of building a network that helps them bypass procedures and gain shortcuts to national resources—then this country is a disaster. And every time we talk about education, it’s as if they were saying: “We’re not going to discuss the education of those people you can buy off with a sandwich and a Coke.” The biggest problem in this country is the terrible education of the upper-middle classes.

—In your earlier films you tended to depict characters from a similar social world to your own. This is the first time you’re making a film from a different place, so to speak. Did you question that while telling this story?
Martel: Of course. Anyone working in film or culture knows the debate around cultural appropriation, around speaking “in someone else’s voice.” But I always knew what interested me was portraying the “white reason” of the Argentine nation—how we managed to fabricate the schemes that allowed us to strip people of their land. Within that structure, of course the other voice seeps through. But it wasn’t “now I’m going to tell you what the Chuschas think of the world.” There’s no part of the film where we talk about the symbolic value of the land or portray Indigenous festivities. I didn’t go there. Instead, we ran a filmmaking workshop for the youth: we left them a camera to shoot with and a computer to edit. Still, I’m not going to stop reflecting on my own time because of a stupid fear or a lack of thought about what cultural appropriation is or isn’t, or about what problems are shared across our nation. I may be wrong in my perspective, but I won’t stop having one.

—A large part of the film takes place at the trial. How did you organize all that material and find visual strategies in such a limited setting?
Martel: We recorded more than 300 hours. It was very hard. We couldn’t stage anything. The judge told us, “Someone can stand here, someone else there; these are the spots, figure it out.” The only real decision we made was placing the main camera facing the defense, since that’s where the most striking information would come from, and putting a zoom on that camera. That was a hypothesis that proved true. That was the biggest directorial decision I could make. Beyond that, I talked to the crew: “Pay attention to this,” things about framing. I have always chosen every frame in my films, one by one, and here it was: “Listen to what’s happening and you’ll know what to do.” And that’s exactly how it worked. Once you focus and enter what’s happening, it’s very hard to get it wrong.

—I noticed you leave in a lot of what the defense lawyers and defendants say—almost as if they expose themselves simply by talking. They reveal their own miseries.
Martel: Many people told me, “But how can you include them saying they were offered 600 pesos or talking about their welfare payments?” But as we listened and edited, we said, “They’re sinking themselves.” We didn’t need any indigenist discourse. For me, a moment is coming in which Argentine cinema will be crucial for future civic life, because politics has already tried every experiment and all have failed spectacularly. Well—maybe we’re still missing a purely leftist government so they also have the chance to fail. So I wonder: what is the role of our work? The same goes for journalism. If you look closely, 90% of journalism is about political maneuvering—we’re stuck in absolute short-termism.

—Did revisiting your own work or the last 20 years of Argentine cinema make you think that maybe we weren’t looking where we needed to, or weren’t critical enough?
Martel: When the dismantling of the INCAA happened—yes, it needed restructuring, because you can’t run an industry where 70% of the budget goes to administration—what was truly revealing to me was this: if the only people defending cinema are people from the film industry, something isn’t working. The universities, for example, weren’t defended only by academics; families defended them, people who consider them a public good. If people didn’t come out en masse to defend cinema, then we failed somewhere. If you’re providing a service to your fellow citizens—and I don’t mean propaganda, but a space for communal reflection—people would defend you. But if we’re fooling around, and I think there was a lot of that, then no one is going to defend cinema except filmmakers and the Institute employees.

—Don’t you think that cinema engaging with its contemporary moment has become marginalized by the dominance of platforms and commercial films? I love that Argentina has made risky films, but it’s also true that they’re not what audiences consume most.
Martel: When I say this, I don’t mean everyone should go out and make documentaries. Make science fiction, whatever—but engage with the community you belong to, or it’s very difficult. You can’t build film careers with ambitions disconnected from the place where you live and its problems. And I think that’s an issue of middle-class education. Universities also need to reflect on this. And then people say, “Oh, you’re playing into the right-wing narrative.” Please. Nothing played more into the right wing’s hands than the way the state was administered under the very popular governments we feel affinity with. Without some self-criticism, we end up like this: young upper-middle-class people completely lacking a sense of community.

—You’re referring to a more socially engaged cinema.
Martel: But I’m not talking about political propaganda films—I’m nowhere near that. But I look around, and I’m affected by what happens. We need to find ways to fall in love with what surrounds us and want it to be better. Then tell the story in whatever genre you want. But not distancing ourselves from our communities and their problems, because they’re also ours. If we’re in a frantic race to succeed on platforms that have no grounding in our world, we’re in trouble. We’ll end up as their employees. It’s madness. If we had an educated upper-middle class, we would have also thought about avoiding total dependence on gigantic companies whose interests have nothing to do with our community. The other day someone showed me a map of how many corporations control most food products—it’s scandalous. Five or six companies, three European and the rest American. The same thing is happening with audiovisual content. It’s in the hands of very few companies that don’t identify with any state, only with interests and businesses that go beyond the idea of a nation. Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk—they’re treated like presidents, but they’re presidents of corporations, not nations, and no one elected them.

—How do you challenge that system with narrative forms that don’t follow its logic? Otherwise you’re left with festivals and small circles. How do you reach people from another place today?
Martel: We made Landmarks with funds we gathered around the world—like all my films—and later a platform comes along wanting to buy it, but they don’t tell us what to do. And you think, “I wish other paths existed too,” but I can’t fight that. I don’t have the strength to make the film independently and fight for a distribution circuit. I don’t have that much energy. So I go as far as I can and then try to give the film the broadest access possible. I can’t escape those circuits either. But with this film, we also thought of some new circuits I’d never explored, so that part of the population who could benefit from the film—but doesn’t have access to cinemas—can still see it. I want to leave this planet feeling I was useful to other people, not just satisfied with myself.

—Well, rest assured: you have been, and still are, for many people.
Martel: I’m not that at peace with my past…

—No? I don’t know, I meet people and sense a kind of reverence for you and your films that’s very beautiful, very striking. People respond to what you do. Don’t you feel that?
Martel: I feel it when I travel, when I meet young people on the street, especially in Latin America, because the audience for my films is very young, and that brings me a lot of joy. But I also feel I should have realized more things earlier.

—In what sense? What things?
Martel: Well… this whole situation. For me it was a slap that shook us all. And honestly, with all the tragedy of having a government this radicalized, with the discourse it has, I think—as painful as it is—that Argentina needed this to happen. Otherwise, we were drifting in a fog of feel-good complacency. I didn’t campaign against this government. I thought, “There’s a part of the population that’s fed up — let them vote for whoever they want.” But I wasn’t going to campaign for the opposition’s electoral trickery either, because they had no real plan for the country. So I said: let whatever needs to happen, happen. What I haven’t seen, for decades now, is any sense of where this country is heading. I don’t have an appetite for power — maybe just for diagnosis — but what I see is people with extraordinary ideas for winning elections, and those ideas end the moment the elections are over. I think within the opposition this slap was felt, especially among the younger ones, and there are people starting to think things through. And that’s a good thing.

Un destino común, de Lucrecia Martel (Caja Negra) Spanish Edition