‘Forest Up in the Mountain’ Berlinale Review: Cinema, Testimony and a State Killing

The reconstruction of events within a criminal trial is a dramatic material that easily lends itself to fiction. Multiple versions of the same incident are laid out, usually contradicting one another, and as viewers we slowly assemble a more plausible sense of what might have happened. As in narrative cinema, facts compete with empathy: identification matters, and belief often hinges on who we trust. Two recent documentaries rely heavily on this kind of reconstruction: Landmarks by Lucrecia Martel and Forest Up in the Mountain by Sofía Bordenave. It is not the only thing these two outstanding Argentine films share, but it is certainly the most distinctive.

Both films revolve around the killing of an Indigenous man by white men in conflicts rooted in disputed land. Both are built around public trials and draw in highly specific ways on the materials produced there. And both take what initially resembles a crime story as a starting point to explore the deeper history of those territorial disputes. Among all these elements, the reconstruction of events stands out as especially powerful. In Forest Up in the Mountain, there is no footage of the shooting itself, as there was in the 2009 killing of Javier Chocobar in Tucumán, but the film shows the accused confronting the friends and relatives of Rafael Nahuel, laying out competing versions of what happened. What emerges from those confrontations is devastatingly clear.

Rafael Nahuel was a 22-year-old Mapuche man who was killed on November 25, 2017, in Villa Mascardi, near Bariloche, during an eviction operation carried out by the Albatros Group of Argentina’s Naval Prefecture against a land recovery led by the Lafken Winkul Mapu community. Nahuel was shot in the back and died while fleeing uphill. Forensic evidence later showed that there had been no armed confrontation and that the Mapuche group had no firearms. What Bordenave’s film—following her earlier Red Star—does is track the case through the trial, using both official recordings and footage shot by the filmmaker, while also creating a space for reflection that helps clarify not only what happened that day but the longer history of Mapuche land claims.

One of the film’s most striking devices is its use of the trial recordings themselves, which were conducted remotely via videoconference—partly because of the pandemic, but also for logistical and security reasons—with the accused appearing from a different location than the judges, lawyers, and witnesses. Beyond the inherent dramatic weight of the testimonies, Bordenave occasionally treats these moments with a touch of dark comedy, as the defendants repeatedly resort to absurd technical excuses, like sudden connection problems that conveniently arise whenever uncomfortable questions are asked.

Another key strand of the film is made up of conversations with Mapuche people from the region, who speak not only about Nahuel’s case but also about their history and their connection to a tradition whose origins and trajectories differ from the official narratives promoted by the state. As is well known, one of the arguments used to justify the repression was the claim that these were not “real” Indigenous communities but improvised armed groups exploiting a Mapuche identity to occupy public land. The film exposes this as a false accusation: the law recognizes Indigenous self-identification and the legitimacy of communities reorganizing after decades of displacement. Archival images and videos from decades past clearly establish the continuity of Mapuche identity among these young people.

Beyond these central threads—almost as a visual counterpoint—Bordenave incorporates maps, documents, old photographs, and other archival materials in a manner that is more experimental than explanatory. These are not mere illustrations for spoken arguments but function as evidence in their own right, showing how the lands now under dispute were understood and documented in the past. The film also opens onto another crucial dimension of the region’s history: environmental degradation. Much of the native forest was replaced decades ago by plantations of exotic pine trees, the result of outdated forestry policies. These pines displace local biodiversity, consume more water, and—most critically—greatly increase the risk of wildfires, as they are highly flammable and allow fire to spread more rapidly.

Through a carefully crafted combination of all these elements, Forest Up in the Mountain becomes a powerful, lyrical, and ultimately bitter document of a territorial conflict that seems endless—and that, amid political shifts and the renewed influence of officials linked to the original case, has once again grown more volatile.