Back in 2010, Argentina’s most internationally renowned filmmaker Lucrecia Martel was browsing YouTube videos when she suddenly got the chills. 

The Salta-born director was looking for footage of unreached indigenous communities, as part of her research for her 2017 period drama Zama, which took place in the 18th century Spanish colony that would later become Argentina. 

While browsing, she came across the footage of a crime: the murder of indigenous leader Javier Chocobar in Tucumán. He was shot to death by former police officer and mining entrepreneur Darío Amín in 2009, during a faceoff over ownership of the land where the Chuschagasta indigenous community lives. Two other men from the Chuschagasta community were also shot in the attack.   

“I realized I had already seen it,” said Martel to the press on Wednesday. “It was chilling — I couldn’t believe I had forgotten about it. That’s when I began researching.”

Martel’s first documentary feature, Landmarks follows the trial for Chocobar’s murder and the life of the Chuschagasta community, as it navigates legal disputes over territory, displacement and the fragile preservation of memory. Combining family photographs, legal files and aerial observational scenes, the film examines how documents and images construct history while also revealing what they actually omit.

The project’s timeline stretched across roughly 15 years, during which production overlapped with Martel’s other projects, including Zama, a literary adaptation that premiered at the Venice film festival in 2017. The initial encounter with the video in YouTube, though, remained the documentary’s starting........

© Buenos Aires Herald