Landmarks

The murder of a leader of Argentina’s Indigenous population becomes the starting point for a visually gripping and expansive portrait of Latin America’s colonial history.

In her first documentary feature, auteur Lucrecia Martel tells the tragic story of Javier Chocobar, leader of the Indigenous community Chuschagasta in northwestern Argentina, who was murdered while trying to protect his people from being forcibly displaced from the land that had been theirs for generations. Despite the murder being filmed, it would take nine years before the perpetrators were brought to trial. The past proves painfully present in this work that is as poetic as it is political, where Martel interweaves the telling silences of the courtroom with the stories of the oppressed.

• Rasmus Kilander