“Nuestra Tierra is both an ethnography and a political act, an act of remembrance and resistance.”

The films of Lucrecia Martel have always centered on northern Argentina; on its land, on its history, and on its people. Nuestra Tierra continues her attachment and affinity. For the first time, Martel delivers a full-length documentary, and yet the preoccupations found in her fictional work remain: colonialism, identity, erasure, and the unequal weight of law. The result is a film that unfolds on two parallel tracks, one a courtroom procedural surrounding the killing of an indigenous leader, and the other a vivid ethnographic study of communities whose very existence has long been denied.

From La Ciénaga to The Headless Woman, Martel always returns to Salta, her hometown in northern Argentina, a region where indigenous populations remain more visible than in Buenos Aires. Zama, her last feature, looked at the colonial past but still carried the same critique of European domination and exclusion. Nuestra Tierra feels like a natural continuation and a companion piece. The colonialism of the past is revealed as the foundation of the present, and the legal disenfranchisement of the indigenous Chuschagasta community is shown to be not an aberration, but the oppressive system functioning exactly as designed.

The film opens with an image from above, a satellite view of Earth, while a voice sings of ‘nuestra tierra’. The title is telling: it can mean ‘our land’ or ‘our earth’, and in that ambiguity lies the heart of the film. Whose land is this? Whose earth? Martel then sweeps her camera across rugged mountains and fertile ground, presenting landscapes that are both beautiful and contested. This land is biodiverse and full of heritage, but is also territory that has been mined, sold, and claimed by those with power.

The central case is the 2009 killing of Javier Chocobar, a leader in the Chuschagasta community. Three white Argentine men, armed and asserting ownership, entered Chuschagasta territory, claiming that because one of their families had bought the land at auction decades earlier, the community had no right to remain there. The land was valuable for quarry mining, and the men believed it was theirs to exploit with backing from the local authorities. In the skirmish that followed Chocobar was shot and killed, the event captured on video. Yet, despite the evidence, it took nine years of protest before the men stood trial, where they denied any wrongdoing in the death of Chocobar.

Martel stages the trial with precision, showing video reconstructions of the day that had been prepared for the trial, presenting both sides, and letting testimony reveal itself. But the film does not remain a legal procedural. Martel turns her camera toward indigenous communities in long interviews and testimonies that stretch beyond the crime. Women and men recount their histories, their identities, their language, and their families. One woman presents photographs spanning more than a century, showing how culture has shifted, how lives have been lived, how memory itself resists erasure.

The word ‘erasure’ hangs heavily over the film. One woman’s voiceover admits, “I was never taught I was an Indian.” The line is shocking, but also a recognition. Governments and societies erase by decree and by pressure of the majorities, by rewriting history until entire peoples are declared nonexistent. In 1807, the Argentine government announced that the Chuschagasta no longer existed. On paper, they were erased. In reality, they remained. The contradiction is glaring – they are accused of clinging to indigenous identity, yet also told they had no identity and existence at all.

Here, Martel’s ethnography folds back into her courtroom study. The trial becomes not only about one murder but about centuries of disenfranchisement. White men arrive in court with polished speeches, carefully coached by lawyers. The indigenous appear without resources, unable to afford the same legal training and forced to defend their existence on terms not of their own making. The disparity is plain to see. Law is a weapon of those who already hold power and land as property defined only by European precedent. Martel pushes this further, connecting to wider histories. In the United States, the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ held that only European Christian men could own land. Indigenous presence on the land never conferred ownership. In Argentina, the same structure endures: adverse possession may apply to European families, but never to indigenous communities. Legal fictions build a system where erasure is baked into the law itself.

Despite its rigor, the film does not dwell only in law or violence. It lingers on people, their words, their photographs, and their lives. It insists on testimony and on giving space to voices that history has tried to silence. For that reason, Nuestra Tierra is both an ethnography and a political act, an act of remembrance and resistance.

If anything falters, it is perhaps the treatment of the murder itself. Though the video evidence is striking, Martel avoids focusing on whether the act was legally murder or manslaughter, instead returning to the larger systems of property and power. Some viewers may find that lack of legal clarity frustrating, but Martel’s point is clear: what matters is not only one killing, but the centuries of dispossession that made it possible, and the structures that continue to ensure indigenous communities remain second-class citizens in their own land. With Nuestra Tierra, Martel has made not just a documentary but a statement. It’s a work that bridges courtroom drama and ethnographic study, history and testimony, law and memory. It is a continuation of her lifelong interest in her country, but also an expansion into a cinema of urgent political presence. If Zama showed the colonial past, Nuestra Tierra shows the colonial present: a system still alive, still functioning, and still in need of reckoning.