‘Landmarks’ Review: Lucrecia Martel’s Sobering Investigation of an Indigenous Leader’s Murder

Of all the questions posed in the legal proceedings following the 2009 murder of Indigenous community leader Javier Chocobar on his own property, none strikes with such force as “Why were you there?” To the Chuschagasta people of Argentina and director Lucrecia Martel, who captures their long struggle for justice in the documentary Landmarks, the repetition of this inquiry only serves to emphasize its absurdity.

From its introductory montage, which opens with satellite imagery above the Earth before narrowing the lens’s focus on the Chuschagasta people’s land in Argentina’s northwestern Tucumán Province, Martel’s first feature-length documentary stresses its need to witness the totality of a tragedy: The murder of the 68-year-old Chocobar by Darío Luis Amín, a local landowner attempting a forcible eviction to exploit his land’s minerals. It’s the latest inflection point in a long fight over territorial custodianship, land rights, and property claims.

The film exists somewhere between a legal drama and an ethnographic portrait of the Chuschagasta community as it strives to maintain dominion over its land. Martel makes a powerful choice to shoot much of the witness testimony at the trial either in profile or from behind the speakers, focusing attention on the message rather than the messengers by denying access to facial expressions. What’s on trial for Martel isn’t merely the actions of Amín and the other accomplices responsible for Chocobar’s death. Landmarks takes up its case against the centuries-old processes of dehumanization and disenfranchisement of a people.

The members of the Chuschagasta community persist against the odds despite not having a common bond of race, language, or any other markers of a protected class. Martel identifies their sense of kinship with the land, and while this hallowed ground bears the fruits of their labors, it cannot express their history and hopes in the way that a documentary can.

The documentary bore the title Chocobar for many years, and it’s apt that Martel changed its Spanish title to Nuestra Tierra. After all, this is less a portrait of one martyred man than a mosaic of a resistant community, and the lack of designation of Chuschagasta individuals by their standing in the group further lends the film an appropriately democratic thrust.

Even though its shift away from the trial feels organic, Landmarks can feel rudderless in its second hour as Martel largely lets the members of the community narrate their own history. Even the most passionate speaker cannot overcome the law of diminishing returns. Still, as she elevates the perspectives of these long-voiceless individuals, each voice solidifies just how much the people typify the rugged resilience of the territory to which they’re committed.

Martel makes frequent use of drones to visually represent this symbiosis, splitting the difference between having a boots-on-the-ground perspective like an equal and a bird’s-eye view that sets the filmmaker apart from the action. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Martel doesn’t feel ashamed to hide the machinery of her gaze—even going so far as to show the drones in a few shots. It’s an acknowledgment of her own role in surveillance of a community, even if it’s for the noble purpose of elevating the cause of the people of that community.

Establishing this outsider’s point of view adds outsized shock to a moment at the end of Landmarks when a bird collides with a drone and sends it plummeting down to the ground. It feels all too appropriate that the members of the Chuschagasta community, long the unwitting object of external attention, get to recapture the frame visually just as they do thematically. The power of the shot demonstrates how the outcome of the Chocobar trial feels almost immaterial to the real resolution of the film. Within the framework that matters to Martel, they’ve won.