Landmarks (documentary) ★★★½

“Our Land”, so the more pronounced original title of Lucrecia Martel‘s feature-length documentary debut, takes a real-life look at the themes that her fictional works like Zama, Holy Girl, or The Headless Woman have explored over and over. Repression on a political, cultural and psychological level, social structures built upon the denial of colonial violence, and the persistence of colonial hierarchies in a supposedly post-colonial world run through the Argentinian director’s investigation of the 2009 murder of Diaguita leader Javier Chocobar during a land dispute in the northern region of her home country. Embedded in its contemporary legal and cultural institutions lingers the same colonial violence within the judicial record.

The brutal crime serves as a starting point for an explorative journey through geographical and historic territory in constant dispute and the continuing struggle of the indigenous resistance. Archival photographs, aerial imagery, and oral histories of the Chuschagasta community thread through the legal testimony at the extraordinarily delayed trial of the three men responsible for Chocobar’s death. These methodical digressions expose the courtroom as one of many contemporary hallmarks of the colonial powers that imposed their legal system and laws. Anticlimactic and anachronistic, the reverse dramatic drive reveals every contemporary act of dispossession echoed by an earlier aggression, until the notion of justice itself becomes an abstract idea disconnected from a bitter reality. 

An imperialist legal system guided by a colonial concept of fairness and righteousness can never make amends for the wrongs caused by the same forces that grant its power. This layered approach addresses the government’s fundamental failure in dealing with the systemic violence against indigenous people whose testimony undercuts the prolonged legal procedural. Drone images look down on the magnificent landscapes with disquieting ambiguity, simultaneously evoking surveillance and territorial control. Inseparable from the ongoing political conflicts is the sheer beauty of Argentine nature, a splendor that strangely contradicts the contested history connected to it. In front of this symbolic and scenic backdrop, the English distribution title itself rings bitterly ironic. 

Congenial sonorous sound design amplifies the imagery’s uncomfortable implications about abuse of power and possession. Heightened ambient noise and surreal echoes augment the tension of the courtroom scenes where every testimony is surrounded by unseen presences. Archival shots accompany an acoustic texture that evokes labour and  excavation, encouraging the viewers’ emotional associations. Thus, the imperialist wrongs linger in documents and collective memory as much as in everyday spaces. Interviews and conversations provide insights into the Chuschagasta people’s position and consistent fight against cultural erasure. By deliberately fragmenting her film’s narrative structure, Martel symbolically deconstructs the established ways of framing indigenous resistance, suggesting that a new way of seeing may open up a new perspective. 

Consequently, the account of a specific crime also questions the construction of national histories, asks whose voices are preserved and whose voices are excluded, and which acts are allowed to reside in collective memory. Cinematic essay and historic reckoning intertwine into an impressive account of the colonial foundations untouched by empty gestures of progress.