Drone footage is common (perhaps too common) in documentaries, and it can feel gimmicky, like the filmmakers got a little too fond of a toy. But for her first nonfiction feature, “Our Land (Nuestra Tierra)” (in theaters), the celebrated Argentine director Lucrecia Martel makes liberal and thoughtful use of drones, gliding repeatedly over the area occupied by the Indigenous Chuschagasta people in Tucumán Province, Argentina. The effect is twofold: We get a sense of the vastness and beauty of the territory. And we become aware of the technology itself — at one point, a bird slams into a drone, knocking it off course.
The intersection of recording technology, history and human lives is the crux of “Our Land,” which was many years in the making. It tells a harrowing story of crime and a hunt for justice. In 2009, three white Argentines — a landowner, Dario Amin, and two former police officers, Luis Humberto Gómez and Eduardo José Valdivieso — went to Chuschagasta territory, seeking access to the community’s quarry and saying they owned the land. An altercation ended with Amin shooting and killing Javier Chocobar, an activist and leader of the community, and injuring several other Indigenous people.
Amin filmed Chocobar’s killing and posted the unedited footage to YouTube. The video spread online, reaching people across the world. It caused outrage in Argentina, where Indigenous people have struggled to gain recognition of their ownership of ancestral lands and have experienced centuries of land theft and violence. The fury led Martel to make a film about Chocobar, but it took nine years for the case to come to trial.
Martel takes a collage approach, trusting the audience to piece together the story as she weaves together different types of footage. There’s some video shot inside the courtroom, where we hear the men on trial as well as character witnesses and others in the community talk about their ideas of what happened. There’s a low-fi re-enactment of the killing, filmed in the spot where it happened. Indigenous community members and Chocobar’s family talk about his life and their history. And Amin’s choppy, almost indiscernible footage of the killing is here, too — you can barely tell what’s happening, just that something horrible did happen.
Occasionally Martel pulls back to slow, elegant drone footage of the landscape, which accrues new meaning as a site of violence and dispute as the film goes on: racism, prejudice, the desire for justice and recognition are all present in this place. Drawing attention to the filming technology, Martel implicitly reminds us that Chocobar’s case only came to trial because it was filmed and uploaded to the internet in the first place. Undeniable visual evidence raised awareness of one man’s death. But the stories that Chuschagasta men and women tell Martel in “Our Land” bear witness to other Indigenous people who, like Chocobar, suffered or died defending their ancestral land, but without cameras there to watch, and only the community left to tell their stories.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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