Nuestra Tierra (Our Land)

 

Director Lucrecia Martel

director on the set

Mercedes Sosa

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NUESTRA TIERRA  (Our Land)                 A-                                                                          aka:  Landmarks                                                                                                                      Argentina  Mexico  France  Netherlands  Denmark  USA  (123 mi)  2025  d: Lucrecia Martel

This film works with our mother tongue and its racist complexities, which prevent many from accessing a vital space.  The language of documents.  The lives of people expelled by papers of dubious value, lives lost in hours of useless procedures.  A historical document is the script of a scene that never existed, but that suits those who sign it.  Here, cinema can be useful.                  —Director Lucrecia Martel

Lucrecia Martel is a largely self-taught queer director who is part of a New Wave of Argentinian filmmakers coming after decades of political and economic crises, including a brutal Dirty War military dictatorship responsible for the disappearance of 30,000 people between 1976 and 1983, which remains prominent in collective memory, opening up new avenues to explore what was previously forbidden.  After gaining acceptance to the country’s only state-sponsored film school, the National School of Film Experimentation and Production (ENERC), with only 30 accepted out of more than a thousand applicants, just as classes were about to begin the school shut down due to lack of funds, leaving her on her own to follow her pursuits, which meant she simply immersed herself into watching and analyzing as many films as possible.  After winning a public script competition, this led to one of her first short films, THE DEAD KING (REY MUERTO) (1995), a feminist western about a woman who escapes her abusive, alcoholic husband with her three children in a small town called Rey Muerto, exhibited in Argentina as part of a larger omnibus film, a collection of short films from all across the country, something that was unprecedented at the time, as it showcased a compilation of new voices.  Since then, Martel has gone on to make four features, LA CIÉNAGA (2001), a masterwork of claustrophobic cinema, THE HOLY GIRL (2004), a coming-of-age psychological drama, THE HEADLESS WOMN (2008), a metaphysical ghost story about Argentina's refusal to acknowledge a widening economic disparity between the middle and lower classes, a trio known as the Salta Trilogy, each having been filmed in her home province and focusing on women and girls who operate outside the social norms, followed by Zama (2017), a period commentary on colonialism and masculinity.  Martel began working on the film in 2010, so if anything ZAMA is the sequel, yet if the extensive credits indicate anything, there was a massive amount of research and more than 400 hours of film to comb through.  Her first feature in eight years, a scathing rebuke to the atrocities of colonialism, past and present, Martel denounces how Argentina has been built on the plunder of indigenous peoples and how history is actually a fiction, a systematic construction of lies meant to conceal and legitimize crimes.  For the director, a country cannot be built on plunder and injustice, where hundreds of years of history have been systematically erased.  The real question this films asks is why do these things happen, as the filmmaker is committed to returning to this indigenous Chuschagasta community what has been stolen from them, their stories and their images, drawn from about 5000 photographs, some, very moving, taken by Javier Chocobar himself, a man at the center of a murder investigation.  Martel is known for her elliptical storytelling, sensory sound design, and hypersensual cinema, with a focus on class and colonial decay, immersing viewers in intimate, humid spaces, leaving out standard exposition for avant-garde techniques, forcing the audience to figure out what is going on.  Martel’s atmospheric films can sometime do the unthinkable and unimaginable as they explore the moral, physical, psychological, and social decay of characters willfully blind to the historical violence and the continuing social costs that pay for their privilege.  Rarely using background music, where the sound design offers a richer meaning, her subtle, minimalist films often take place in her native Salta, Argentina, the province just north of Tucumán, where the hot, sticky environments act as metaphors for social inertia and trapped desire.  It’s important to point out that in Spanish, “Nuestra tierra” means both “our land” and “our Earth,” something that gets lost in the English translation.  This is a film that not only counters the nation’s official history, but is most remarkable in revealing how that truth has been fabricated.

In her first documentary feature, Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel investigates the 2009 murder of indigenous activist Javier Chocobar, who was shot and killed while defending his community’s land and from being forcibly evicted from their land by a local white landowner Darío Amín, a wealthy rancher and miner and two former police officers, one of whom can be heard on a video recording, “Nobody listens to them in court,” leaving two other community members seriously wounded as well.  Alternating between footage of this controversial, long-delayed (9 years after the incident) trial, which hinges on a shaky cell-phone video, testimonials from Chuschagasta community members who have called the Tucumán Province in northwest Argentina their home for untold generations, and aerial drone footage of the stunning province Chocobar fought to defend.  What’s truly unique about this film is how it not only puts the accused men on trial, with footage of public court testimony, but the entire country of Argentina on trial through extensive research into the thefts of land over centuries, turning bureaucracy into a weapon that entirely sanctions murder of indigenous life, expanding into a searing examination of centuries-old colonial violence, eviction, land exploitation, and cultural erasure that continue to shape Latin America today, essentially turning indigenous communities invisible and wiping them off the map with proclamations that they no longer exist, while then opening up their lands and resources to the highest bidder.  Co-written by Martel and María Alché, who was the star in THE HOLY GIRL, working with historian Milena Acosta, the film poses the question, who really owns the land, which once belonged exclusively to the indigenous until colonialist intruders took the land by force, literally stealing it right out from under them with no legal consequences, as the law typically ignored indigenous rights, where the country never faced investigative scrutiny - - until this film, which starts out as one thing, examining what happened in the killing of a Chuschagasta leader, questioning the evidence and court testimony in this specific case, where at one point, we see Chocobar’s widow pleading, “Is God a witness to all this?”  Martel then broadens that search into an existential question of who really owns the land, as those who claimed to hold the titles obtained them by unscrupulous means, through land auctions by sellers who never actually held them either, an egregious example of state-enabled land theft, premised on the fiction of Terra nullius, or “nobody’s land,” that has justified the colonial invasion of indigenous lands for centuries.  To the Chuschagasta community, no one person owns the land, as it belongs to all of them.  It’s a bit surprising when the actual murder trial begins asking these unanswerable questions, with historians brought in to describe the evolution of bogus titles, while the indigenous communities themselves have lived on that land for as long as they can remember, providing photographs, family memorabilia, and personal accounts of growing up there, where even the native people were unaware they were indigenous.  “We were taught what the books said,” as according to Argentine history, the indigenous peoples, those who were called the “indios (Indians),” disappeared after the Spanish colonization, yet their existence is undeniable, with Martel paying cinematic tribute to people who were systematically erased from history, revealing how the historical fractures of Argentina continue to manifest in the present.  History has been present in all of Martel’s earlier films, all but this one taking place in the northwest Salta region, yet this happened just 300 kilometers from where she lives, where so many have indigenous heritage, but never explored with this degree of investigation that incorporates meticulous historical research.  Since the end of the military dictatorship, the reconstruction of democracy has depended on an ongoing public and political negotiation of just what constitutes history.

Because historians denied the very existence of indigenous peoples, perpetuated by the Church and academics, this opened up avenues to legitimize land appropriation, leading to collusions between landowners and the police, as farmers and developers were allowed to harvest the land, using indigenous workers as unpaid labor, basically stealing their crops and animals, and then charging them for it.  As it turns out, the three men who happened to visit the Chuschagasta community land were land developers there to drive the native community off the land they had been living in for almost 400 years to recover a mining quarry located in the center of their territory.  This is a tactic that had been used for decades, so for generations, this is what indigenous communities faced and were used to, acknowledging that as soon as the developers indicated they just wanted to talk, this was a sign that they would eventually lose something, as they never just wanted to talk.  Implicit in these tactics is the underlying belief that the indigenous have no sovereignty on their land, that white privilege allows them to take what they want.  And on this occasion as well, the day of the murder, this is how the conversation began, yet these three were also the only ones to bring guns and use them, firing nine shots, threatened by the larger crowd that was gathering, though no one, not a single individual, was armed, used force, or actually threatened them in any way, as they simply witnessed what was happening, and took pictures, which was the best way to deal with developers who want to conduct their business in private, out of sight and away from any accountability, where they could simply take what they wanted by force, incident by incident, thoroughly convinced of the righteousness of their cause, and in the inferiority of the native peoples, an example of racism, paternalism, and infantilization.  No legal channels had ever stopped this type of conduct and behavior before, but this murder was different, as there were so many witnesses, even a jagged cellphone video that was presented at trial, allowing the entire world to see for themselves and make their own determination, though once a series of shots was fired, the camera remained fixed on the ground, where all you can hear are screams, heavy breathing, and the chaotic sounds of a physical struggle.  This wider scope, as well as the filming of the trial, and a recreation of the crime scene itself, which drew plenty of publicity, with the police flying their own drones, placed a different kind of pressure on the courts, where “the whole world was watching,” to quote Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), so it required that they dig a little deeper in their examination of who really owns the land, and just what constitutes a crime.  Martel deviates from anything resembling standard documentary filmmaking, allowing the Chuschagasta community to speak for themselves, offering a heavily archived rebuttal to the axiom, “history is written by the victors,” creating a visceral space that lets viewers absorb the racist, colonialist complexities of the legal and social systems in Argentina, connecting the past and present.  Opening with NASA space station images of Earth accompanied by the Kyrie from Misa Criolla, composed by Ariel Ramírez and sung by the legendary Argentine folk singer Mercedes Sosa, Mercedes Sosa - Misa Criolla - Kyrie YouTube (5:02), an indigenous woman from Tucumán, and a member of the communist party, forced into exile in Europe after facing censorship, arrests on stage, and severe death threats from the military regime in Argentina.  Martel chose this piece because it represents the Catholic faith embraced by the local indigenous communities, yet sung by a non-believer, and, to an Argentine ear, highlights an indigenous voice, perhaps for the very first time.  By the end of the film, we hear her sing another song about the land, a beautiful homage to the working class, nature, and the dream of justice and peace, Mercedes Sosa - Cuando tenga la tierra HD (Alta Calidad) YouTube (3:38)

This actually recalls a similar languid style of Chilean filmmaker Marcela Said’s The Summer of Flying Fish (El verano de los peces voladores) (2013), where the visualization of the immense landscape is paramount, drawing attention to its vast permanence, where its primordial existence came long before any human beings set foot, creating this elusive realm that is difficult to understand, as it existed in all its glory before any human communities were established.  But once schools, railroads, and newspapers began telling tales, stories were told only from the point of view of the colonial invaders, never from the indigenous people who actually lived there.  To that end, this film is eye-opening, beautifully shot by Ernesto De Carvalho, as it tends to accentuate the land through extensive drone footage sweeping across the mostly untouched hills and valleys, where cows or horses may be seen in their native habitat, yet after a bird smashes into a drone, things suddenly appear upside down, suggesting the truth may be more complex and harder to comprehend than we realize.  This extreme visualization draws viewers into the subject matter, allowing the land itself to become a central character, where the question of “ownership” becomes a touchy subject, as Argentine citizens once legally “owned” slaves from the 16th to the 19th centuries, having brought them across an ocean to their shores to perform most of the heavy work, living in brutally harsh conditions where they had no rights whatsoever, but were routinely punished or shackled for the most minor infringements.  There are no books in school that were told from the point of view of the slaves, as they were not allowed to read or write, so their historical perspective, like the indigenous, was never told.  Earlier this year, Argentina made international news for being one of only three countries (the other two being Israel and the U.S.) to vote against a UN resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade a crime against humanity (The myth of white Argentina still shapes the nation | Slavery), while in November 2024, Argentina was the only country to vote against a United Nations draft resolution on indigenous rights.  Some from the indigenous communities described the long distances and dangerous river crossings they had to endure just to get to school, where they were continually abused and disrespected and treated like garbage, yet they exhibit no hostile or angry reaction, as they are essentially peaceful and adaptable.  Their input is invaluable in this film, as it exposes an entire culture that has been declared dead and remained invisible for centuries, yet behind these individual stories, which have never been told, there are literally hundreds of thousands of other stories behind them, without which today’s voices would never be heard.  While Argentine President Javier Milei has systematically defunded the INCAA, Argentina's National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts, as his government is very much against cinema and its new generation of filmmakers, Martel has raised a topic that is absolutely crucial to her provincial region, opening a dialogue with an otherwise silenced indigenous collective memory that is historically marked by plunder, placing in the foreground the social cracks of Argentina.  For Martel, cinema is “a tool of transformation,” where this is a deeply humane documentary posing legal and existential questions that really have no answers, forcing viewers to make their own determinations.  One of the most memorable shots takes place inside a massive Catholic church, where one of the stained glass panels exhibits a shot of God hurling thunderbolts at the presumably “bad” indigenous people, as if by divine order, to make way for the Argentinian heroes.  And while this may not be what anyone would describe as a riveting account, with plenty of meandering along the way, as if getting lost in the questions, this does have a unique and distinct point of view that makes it essential viewing.   

Where the Crawdads Sing

 

Director Olivia Newman

Producer Reese Witherspoon with lead cast

cinematographer Polly Morgan with Daisy Edgar-Jones

Mark and Delia Owens

Author Delia Owens

Delia Owens

Newman, Witherspoon,Edgar-Jones,Taylor John Smith, and Owens

WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING    C                                                                                     USA  (125 mi)  2022  ‘Scope  d: Olivia Newman

Sometimes I feel so invisible, I wonder if I’m here at all.                                                               —Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones)

A cinematic interpretation of the best-selling novel by Delia Owens, topping The New York Times bestseller list for two years in a row in 2019 and 2020, making her fiction debut at the age of 70, with a script written by Lucy Alibar, who seems to have a thing for movies set in southern states, having previously written the Oscar-nominated screenplay for the southern Gothic depiction in Benh Zeitlin’s 2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #1 Beasts of the Southern Wild, and while filmed in Louisiana, this one is set in the marshlands of North Carolina, near a fictional town called Barkley Cove.  Produced and championed by actress Reese Witherspoon, who advocates female-centric stories, gushing endlessly about how much she loves the novel, describing it as “a love letter to growing up in the South,” with the popular novel selling 22 million copies, Excerpt from Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens, part coming-of-age novel and part crime drama, intertwining issues of law, race, gender, morality, and murder, but it is not without controversy, as part of author Delia Owens’ hidden past has come to light, having been involved in a real-life murder case with her now-estranged husband Mark Owens and his son Christopher.  Like the protagonist in the story, Owens had a lifelong love of nature and wildlife, having studied biology at the University of Georgia, where she met her husband Mark, receiving a degree in zoology before obtaining a doctorate in animal behavior from the University of California at Davis, both avid conservationists moving to Africa to study animals in their natural habitat, spending more than twenty years there, writing several books and articles for professional journals, yet what they really found deplorable was the rampant poaching of elephants and rhinoceroses in Zambia who were senselessly killed for illegal tusks and horns that could be sold on the black market.  Desperate to stop this bloody practice, their activism grew more militant, seeing themselves as guardians of the wildlife, instilling a white savior approach to policing the Zambian wildlife preserves, with Mark and his son conducting airborne raids against poaching camps, where they were emboldened enough to call an ABC News show Turning Point to follow them on one of their raids, with their cameras capturing footage of a suspected black African poacher who was actually shot on camera, wounded initially, followed by several more rounds coming from offscreen until he was dead, which aired in a documentary special entitled Deadly Game: The Mark and Delia Owens Story on March 30, 1996.  An in-depth investigative article was written by Jeffrey Goldberg from The New Yorker, March 29, 2010, The Hunted | The New Yorker, where he actually interviewed the cameraman, Chris Everson, who shot the TV footage, who identified Christopher as the shooter responsible for the deadly rounds.  Owens rarely discusses this matter in public, having distanced herself from the event and the participants, simply claiming she was not involved in the shooting, though she and the others are still wanted for questioning by the Zambian police, as the body has never been found, evidently dropped from a helicopter into a nearby lagoon, likely devoured by crocodiles, with all three of them leaving the country immediately afterwards and have never returned.  One of the things that stands out is that the 2018 novel echoes many of the same themes from Delia Owens’ life in Zambia, drawing on her experience of living in the wilderness, cut off from society, with eerie similarities to the murder there, while also including a pattern of perpetuating racial stereotypes.  Even the jailhouse cat whom the protagonist befriends while awaiting trial is named after a Zambian man, Sunday Justice, who once worked in the Owens’ camp as a cook.  This is simply the backdrop to the film, which became a hot topic when Taylor Swift wrote an Instagram post that she was a big fan of the book, adding eyes to the project, writing that she “wanted to create something haunting and ethereal to match this mesmerizing story,” writing a song that plays over the end credits, Taylor Swift - Carolina (From The Motion Picture “Where The ... YouTube (2:53), using mostly women in key creative positions, directed by Olivia Newman, who has a Master’s degree in film from Columbia University.

A film that screams Hallmark made-for-TV movie where women are a central focus, with parallels to the trial sequence in Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), while also recalling Mary Steenburgen in Martin Ritt’s CROSS CREEK (1983), a fictionalized adaptation of a trip to the back woods of Florida in the 1930’s where author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Yearling, based in part on Rawlings’ 1942 memoir Cross Creek, yet also Andrei Konchalovsky’s SHY PEOPLE (1987), a Faulknerian story set in the back bayous of southern Louisiana.  With a production budget of $24 million, this is a story about abandonment, domestic abuse and neglect, the long-lasting impact of trauma, the power of literacy and friendship, and the wild, beautiful spaces of the marsh, where the naturalistic setting is the film’s calling card and is the dominant aspect overshadowing all else, WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING – First 10 Minutes YouTube (9:57), although it’s hard to miss a flying CGI heron in the opening sequence that transports us into the marsh, opening in 1969 with a dead body discovered at the bottom of a 63-foot tall observational fire tower, with the police attempting to discover if the victim was intentionally pushed or whether it was accidental.  “A swamp knows all about death, and doesn’t necessarily define it as tragedy, certainly not a sin.”  Moving back and forth between different periods, with the changing timelines shown on the screen, another flashback to the early 1950’s reveals a backwoods family living along a pristine marsh with an alcoholic and abusive father, whose violence against his wife and kids drives them away from the home one by one, leaving ten-year old Kya Clark (Jojo Regina) alone after her father leaves, creating a series of improbable events, where she is forced to raise herself in that isolated swamp accessible only by boat traffic, with no electricity or running water.  Kya is the lead protagonist, much like Delia Owens, a naturalist and loner, shunned by the neighboring town and community, who view her only with derision and contempt, disdainfully referred to as the “Marsh girl,” mocked for her poverty and ridiculed out of school on her very first day, leaving her unable to read or write as she grows up, instead she spends her time observing and drawing the natural wildlife, especially the birds, developing an extraordinary artistic talent, where her shack is lined with these watercolors.  She is also a curious collector of feathers, shells, leaves, flowers, and other wild things, assembling quite a collection, where her home becomes a repository of these discovered items, like a “glass menagerie.”  Her only friends in town are a black couple running a general store, Mabel and Jumpin’ Madison, (Charlene Michael Hyatt and Sterling Macer Jr.), who assume the role of guardians once all her family has left, the only ones really looking out for her, and she survives by selling them mussels.  Based on her outsider status, ostracized and reviled by the community, where she pretty much just keeps to herself, she is the likely suspect in the opening murder, with the police arresting her, building a case solely on circumstantial evidence, yet her name is dragged through the mud all over town, where the only townsperson willing to look through the glaring wall of prejudice is retired attorney Tom Milton (David Strathairn).  There is a stark contrast between the purity of innocence that Kya represents, completely immersed in the world of the marsh, befriending the wildlife, her one and only real friend, where her moral compass, social expectations, and concept of justice are shaped by observing the natural world, while the real dangers and threats come from the contaminating influences of town.  Where most individuals would struggle with isolation and self-preservation, Kya learned to thrive, enjoying every tiny aspect of nature, learning that everything is interconnected, all in harmony with the elements.  Once she’s older, blossoming into British actress Daisy Edgar-Jones, requiring a dialect coach to learn a southern accent, she eloquently narrates the story through a series of continuing voiceovers, adding a literary aspect along with wisdom beyond her years, and a perspective that is all her own, something of a wild child, yet restrained and self-reflective, never looking dirty or unkempt, with no sign whatsoever of bugs or mosquitoes out in the marsh, which is a bit of a mystery, seemingly impossible, so viewers are equally transported into a world of make-believe, which is sumptuously shot in ‘Scope by Polly Morgan, with music by Mychael Danna.

Equally improbable is a series of two drastically different love interests, neither one fully fleshed out, feeling more like movie characters, expressed through flashback sequences as Kya languishes in prison awaiting her trial, as Kya is befriended by Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith), having run into him throughout her childhood fishing in the marsh, finally meeting him out in the woods, lured by feathers left behind on an old tree stump, both sharing a common interest in nature, but he’s about to head off to college to study biology, but before he does he lends her books and teaches her to read and write, even writing down names of publishers that she can send her drawings off to for a possible book, providing another potential source of income.  Both seem inseparable, but his father warns him that rumors about them could jeopardize his future.  He heads off early for a job working in the biology lab, but promises to return on the 4th of July, asking her to meet him, but when the night arrives he’s a no show, leaving her utterly devastated, Where the Crawdads Sing (2022) - Tate Doesn't Come Back ... YouTube (3:09), where her many years of loneliness only accentuate the excruciating feeling of loss, “Being alone is a pain whose vastness is so great you can hear echoes.”  Miraculously, one of the publishers comes through, enthusiastically supporting her work, where the money she earns actually allows her to buy up all the land around the property, ensuring that it’s not stolen out from under her by developers, who are planning luxury condos out in the marsh.  Years later she begins a relationship with Chase Andrews, played by Harris Dickinson from Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats (2017) and Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (Sans Filtre) (2022), a pompous and promiscuous football star who is something of a charmer and sweet talker, used to getting everything he wants, and he wants Kya.  While viewers can spot a cad immediately, Kya is not so worldly, and is more easily ensnared, with next to nothing known about this man, often taking her feelings for granted for his own sexual pleasure, where he seems to manipulate her at every turn, even making plans for marriage without even asking her, but he does find a rare shell that she makes into a necklace and gives back to him, which he never takes off, but the real kicker happens when she sees him in town with another girl who’s engaged to be his wife.  This deception hits like a ton of bricks, where she really doesn’t want to have anything more to do with him, but he doesn’t take no for an answer, drunkenly having his way with her, punching her in the face and forcing himself on her, violently raping her, where she has to beat him in the head with a rock to get him off of her.  She had seen this violent behavior before with her father, “One thing I learned from Pa, these men must have the last punch,” where destruction is a way of punctuating their pent-up rage and anger, as he ends up trashing her home, with destroyed drawings strewn all over the place.  Shortly afterwards she is arrested for his murder, though she was in another town visiting with her publishers for the first time face to face, celebrating yet another published book, but the prosecutor believes she could conceivably have disguised herself while taking a night bus back to Barkley Cove and back again with none of the publishers noticing her absence.  Nonetheless, it’s a disturbing time, turning into an extended trial sequence, where the victim is none other than Chase Andrews (Owens’ version of a poacher), a local big shot, as his parents are loaded with money, where it’s their influence that is driving the trial, literally demanding her conviction after that necklace he was wearing goes missing at the time of his death, suggesting only Kya would have any real interest.  The direction of this film is simply unremarkable, with problematic characters, as Kya is overly saccharine and sweet, even saintly, while the men in her life are predictably one-dimensional, and the supporting characters in town couldn’t be more diabolically stereotypical, with the entire town literally sneering at this girl, treating her with nothing but contempt, preferring to believe she’s an inferior uncivilized being out in the marsh, where they don’t begin to understand or appreciate who she really is, much more intelligent and morally complex than they give her credit for.  It’s something of a sentimentalized mystery movie, where small-town prejudice is a prevailing theme, but despite a reverence for nature, with wild creatures doing what they need to do in order to survive, it’s a tepid, overly sanitized and simplistic rendering that is never fully believable.