Landmarks [+lire aussi :
critique
interview : Lucrecia Martel
fiche film] is the first documentary feature by Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel, whose fiction films have been lauded for their perceptive storytelling and deeply affective performances. Premiering out of competition at Venice, Landmarks is a document par excellence, since it chronicles the Argentinian state’s systematic denial of land rights to indigenous communities, particularly the Chuschagasta. Martel worked on this film for 15 years, ever since the community’s leader Javier Chocobar was gunned down in 2009 by landowners. Cineuropa spoke to the filmmaker, who was keen to discuss the stakes of her film as an archive.

Cineuropa: Before it was Nuestra tierra [the Spanish-language title, lit. “Our Land”], the project was called Chocobar, after the late Javier Chocobar. Why the change?
Lucrecia Martel: The film was always going to be called Nuestra tierra, but internally, we used the title Chocobar – that was also the name of the folder on my computer with all of the research. It got out when a development grant was announced at Locarno. I wonder whether people were expecting another film, unaware it was the same project.

How do you feel about the English title, Landmarks?
I don't know English very well, but [US producer] Joslyn Barnes suggested that. It seems fine to me, but what do you think?

I like the “marks” part of it because it reminds me of “scars”.
She also said that, actually – that there were scars on the land.

Can you talk about the power of documentary cinema to make archives where there weren’t any?
It’s a very important point. While making the film, there were many times when I was looking at documents and the personal archives of the Chuschagasta people, wondering whether we should include entire photographs within the frame, as actual photographs. Instead, I decided that we should zoom in and “enter” the scene of the photos. As for the documents we found, we scanned all of them and gave them to the community – the film [itself] is the archive of what we did. If I made mistakes out of ignorance, at least there are these files that exist outside of the film. That could provide relief from my own sadness at the situation.

At one point, we see the community watching a film projected on a screen outdoors. Were you showing them parts of Landmarks?
What you see is indeed from the film, but what’s more interesting is that the same day, there was a screening of a short film made by the children as part of a filmmaking workshop that we did with [cinematographer] Ernesto de Carvalho. But the images you see are not those ones.

Why didn’t you use them?
It was never my intention to make a “collective film” – Landmarks is a film that I directed, edited and decided on the sound for. There shouldn’t be any misunderstanding: it is not the voice of the community. That would have been very irresponsible on my part. The responsibility lies with me: when I say that those [men] are killers, I don't want people to think that it’s the community saying that.

The land is shown through the “eyes” of drone cameras, in ways no human eye can grasp. But was there any ambivalence about using drones because of their military design?
Yes, that posed a problem for me because I never imagined I would use a drone. But when the police used drones to film the reconstruction of the crime, it gave me an idea: to use those images in favour of our film and the community. When I first saw a picture from above, I understood how the territory was organised. It’s difficult to understand the land from a point of view on the ground, but when you have this higher vantage point, you can grasp the beauty of the place. When you think of lands that are taken from indigenous people, you maybe think of raw materials, petrol or water, but there is also the beauty itself that is stolen.