Landmarks / Nuestra tierra, the debut documentary feature by trailblazing Argentine director Lucrecia Martel, won the Best Film Award in the Official Competition at this year’s BFI London Film Festival.
The jury—composed of producer Elizabeth Karlsen, film critic Justin Chang, and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph—stated: “With deep empathy and extraordinary journalistic and cinematic rigor, Lucrecia Martel dives into the events surrounding the 2009 murder of Chuschagasta leader Javier Chocobar in Argentina’s Tucumán Province. In foregrounding present-day voices and neglected histories, Martel creates a portrait of—and for—an Indigenous community, granting them a measure of the justice the courts have long denied them. Within a remarkably strong competition, our jury is proud to honor this singular achievement.”
Martel’s film opens on a haunting true story: In the remote hills of northern Argentina, a confrontation unfolds between a man, his two accomplices, and the Indigenous community of Chuschagasta. Claiming ownership of ancestral land and armed with guns, the men open fire—killing community leader Javier Chocobar. The murder, captured on video, becomes an unflinching testament to a history written in violence.
What follows is nearly a decade of silence and protest. For nine long years, the killers walk free while the Chuschagasta people fight to be heard. When the trial finally begins in 2018, it marks not only a quest for justice, but a reckoning with centuries of dispossession.
Blending the community’s own voices and photographs with the tense atmosphere of the courtroom, Martel crafts a haunting meditation on land, power, and the persistence of memory in a country still shadowed by its colonial past.
The 69th BFI London Film Festival took place in the United Kingdom from October 8 to 19.
