Lucrecia Martel’s films have tended to pivot on one precise dramatic and existential conflict: the guilt of a middle-aged, bourgeois woman who may’ve committed manslaughter in The Headless Woman [+lee también:
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entrevista: Lucrecia Martel
ficha de la película]. With Landmarks, the Argentinian great’s inaugural feature-length documentary, we can feel her siphoning reams of material in search of a coherent through line, and if that’s not perfectly achieved, she’s constructed both a fitting exposé of Argentina’s treatment of its indigenous population and a tribute to their endurance. The film has premiered out of competition at Venice.

Martel had been working on this film even before Zama (itself eventually released in 2017), the impetus being her viewing of graphic smartphone footage of indigenous community leader Javier Chocobar’s 2009 killing, in a valley in the country’s northwestern Tucumán province. With the murder trial for the three suspects commencing belatedly in 2018, she documented the proceedings with the support and involvement of the Chuschagasta community he belonged to, becoming a dedicated cinematic witness to the latest chapter of their struggle.

The particular incident is highlighted by Martel and the documentary’s co-writer, María Alché, as a symbolic moment of violence, representative of the displacement of the Chuschas over several generations, yet also a moment for wrongdoing to finally be recognised by the highest legal authority. The three defendants were landowner Dario Luis Amín, and police officers Luis Humberto Gómez and Eduardo José Valdivieso, who were seemingly deployed as security; they were on a reconnaissance trip to identify land for mining opportunities. When they were confronted by Chocobar’s own group, a stand-off resulted in shots being fired, with the activist leader dying and two of his comrades being injured.

In the oddly cramped and dowdy courtroom, the defendants and their court attorneys unconvincingly offer their evidence and excuses, whilst the Chuschas present (among them Chocobar’s widow, Antonia, and his son Gabriel) look on solemnly. Martel eventually pivots back to the trial’s ambiguous and still-unresolved conclusion, but takes the evidence proffered in the deposition as a new narrative thread to expand on the life of this community, and their experiences of family and labour in Tucumán and the urban areas southwards. With the layered primary sources of photographs, adding to the late 2000s-era phone footage from the aftermath of the shooting, reenactments of the events in the original location for the trial years later and Martel’s drone-captured actuality footage of the exterior locale, we’re granted an ever-shifting tapestry of the life of a self-sufficient community, amidst a legal and political system attempting to erase them. If Martel herself is an outsider – identifying from her own background with the European-descended settlers and their continued dominance – her multifarious film language, capturing the events in tandem with self-reflexive and suggestive annotations, more than justifies her allyship.

Landmarks is a co-production by Argentina, the USA, Mexico, France, Denmark and the Netherlands, staged by Rei Pictures, Louverture Films, Piano, Pio & Co, Snowglobe and Lemming Film. Its world sales are by The Match Factory.