Lucrecia Martel’s years-in-the-making documentary about the murder of an Indigenous Argentinian man starkly lays out the rigged justice system in her homeland.
Landmarks is a landmark in and of itself, in the career of celebrated Argentinian auteur Lucrecia Martel, as her first foray into documentary, after a career making classics including The Holy Girl, The Headless Woman, and Zama. Playing at times like a restrained fictional courtroom drama, this documentary explores the 2018 trial of a group of men for the murder of indigenous community leader Javier Chocobar in 2009. That long gap between Chocobar’s death and his murderers facing justice provides the first clue that this is a trial taking place in a particular context, one which Martel unfolds gradually, with surgical precision, in a documentary defined by robust and muscular filmmaking technique allied to a clear-eyed, slow-burning anger.
The fact that Javier Chocobar, a 68-year-old member of the Indigenous Chuchagasta community, was killed, is not disputed, but almost everything else about the incident is contested. The defendants, Darío Amín, Luis Humberto Gómez and Eduardo José Valdivieso, were captured on camera phone footage, but do not agree with the prosecution about what the low resolution images show. Their narrative is that they were travelling together to explore getting access to a quarry, when members of the Chuchagasta community in northwest Argentina’s Tucumán Province surrounded them.
Amín, Gómez and Valdivieso claim that they believed that they were moments from death, that they felt threatened. It’s hard to square with what we see on a camera: a group of men and women and young people gathering calmly. The defendants make much of the fact that two of their number are former police officers. Two Chuchagasta community members were wounded in the altercation, in addition to Chocobar being killed, and the defendants argue that this proves their intentions were defensive, because if they had been trying to kill them, as ex police officers, they could easily have done so. They don’t appear to consider that this ludicrous line of argument makes it hard to believe these supposedly seasoned experts genuinely feared for their lives during the initially calm stand-off.
And yet throughout the film, there’s this feeling that the courtroom is on the defendants’ side. For the most part, their testimony is heard respectfully, while the Chuchagasta witnesses are asked constantly to speak up, repeat themselves, and clarify. Only when one of the defendants begins yelling is he asked to modify his tone. His arrogance, as someone who believes he will get away with being aggressive in a context where he has been accused of letting his aggression get the better of him, is very clear.
The oppressive myth of the “perfect witness” looms large over the Chuchagasta’s own testimonies, where any inconsistencies between an oral account in 2018 and a written statement given in 2009 are pounced upon as evidence of unreliability. Whether the Chuchagasta legally owns the territory where the murder took place, and whether their community exists at all in a legal sense, become key avenues of exploration. Even the fact that the trial is taking place nearly a decade after the murder speaks volumes about the obstacles created by the inequalities between the defendants and the victims.
Martel’s strategy is to allow these facts to speak largely for themselves, but she also makes intelligent use of aerial footage, shot from different heights, to give what could be described as a god’s eye view of proceedings, were it not for the fact that the gaze is that of a silent witness. Zoomed out from the intricacies of colonial systems of land rights and legal precedents and court procedure, the camera shames the defendant’s use of such artificial systems to litigate a crime rooted in who has the right to live, and where.