"I Needed to Rely on What I Knew": Lucrecia Martel on Her First Documentary, "Landmarks"
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"I Needed to Rely on What I Knew": Lucrecia Martel on Her First Documentary, "Landmarks"
"But if the tension between core and periphery isn't anything novel, the film's visual language most definitely is. Landmarks begins in outer space, a celestial prologue scored to Mercedes Sosa's "Señor, ten piedad de nosotros," a Kyrie from Ariel Ramírez's Misa Criolla, before drone shots send us flying over Tucumán's mountains. This is a brand-new camera movement for Martel, in whose hands the technology registers not as a mechanism of surveillance but a means to immortalise the area in all its glorious, rugged beauty."
"A chronicle of the trial for the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar-a member of the indigenous Chuschagasta community killed by a white landowner and two former cops in Tucumán, Argentina-the film still speaks to her ongoing concerns with the vestiges of the country's colonial past. Martel is as interested in following the trial as she is in charting a history of the Chuschagastas and their struggles against land dispossession."
The film chronicles the trial for the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar, a member of the indigenous Chuschagasta community killed by a white landowner and two former police in Tucumán, Argentina. The footage alternates between courtroom proceedings and scenes recorded in Tucumán, including a re-enactment of the assassination performed before the judge by the perpetrators and witnesses. The film traces the Chuschagastas' history and struggles against land dispossession, connecting the case to the country's colonial past and imperialist myths that have enabled similar atrocities to remain unpunished. The visual language combines celestial prologues, drone landscapes and lingering archival photographs to memorialize the region.
Read at Filmmaker Magazine
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