EXCLUSIVE: The 58th president of Argentina, Alberto Fernández, is not particularly well considered at home. During his mandate, he supervised historical economic problems and is currently tried for presidential corruption. Abroad, his stock is even lower, most people associating him with a series of comments he made during a trip to Spain in 2021.
“The Mexicans came from the Indians, the Brazilians came from the jungle, but we argentines from ships. And they were ships from Europe,” said Fernández. Later, he apologized for the comments, who were largely sentenced as racists. The offensive tetraptych has also sparked a furious regional debate on Argentines, which has long had a reputation in Latin America to consider itself distinct from other Latin nations due to the significant percentage of the population of the country which retraces its ancestry to European colonists, mainly from Spain and Italy.
Argentina was of course not born a homogeneous state. Like its neighbors, when it was created, Argentina had a large black population, from Africans enslaved to the continent on many of the same ships as Fernández mentioned. Before that, an indigenous population occupied the land with its own languages, religions and distinct economies, many of which still exist today despite decades of brutal repression of the Argentine state.
It is “the madness of the culture of white Latin America”, tells us passionately by the Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel. A madness that she explores in her exceptional documentary functionality, Benchmarks (our land), Who made his debut this week in Venice. The film will play Tiff on Monday before projecting film festivals from Camden, New York and London. You can watch an exclusive film clip above.
Built over almost a decade, the film explores the violent strategies used by the Argentine state to grasp the territory of the country’s indigenous community of the country. The film is shaped around the legal trial of three state agents accused of the murder of a young man from Chuschagasta named Javier Chocobar. The Chocobar incident was a very publicized case in Argentina. The murder was filmed. The images show a state official and two accomplices who try to expel members of the Aboriginal community from Chuschagasta from their land in northern Argentina. By claiming the property of the land and armed with firearms, they kill Chocobar. After nine years of demonstrations, the legal proceedings on the case were finally opened in 2018.
Martel says that she first built the idea for Benchmark While pulling his last feature film, Exist (2017), a superb exploration of the colonial history of Argentina through the history of a fictitious Spanish magistrate who languishes in a colonial outpost to which he was relegated.
“They were two parallel ideas developed together,” says Martel, adding that it had taken him much more time to bring Benchmark On the screen due to “many years of research, research and sorting all the archives and images of Aboriginal families to create history”.
“I also needed time to stay in the community,” explains Martel. “It was a real obstacle. The community does not trust easily, especially when people come and ask for things. ”
Martel says that she received the most archives during her last months of production from an older chuschagasta woman who, several years earlier, at the start of the process, told her that there was no useful material in the community.
“In the end, she gave me a box with hundreds of photos and archive materials that date back to the beginning of the century that belonged to her family,” explains Martel.
With all this material, the question remains: how to present it best to an audience? The end result in Benchmark is daring and ambitious. Martel brings together archive photographs and letters with images of the real criminal trial alongside intimate interviews with members of the Chuschagasta community. The visual language that Martel has created allows the film to remain agile, almost elusive, in its traditional way, while remaining accessible to the public.
An important part of the film also presents images shot using drones, a choice that the public may not expect a filmmaker like Martel, whose cinema is best known for his dedication to the subtleties of life. The veteran filmmaker said she was inspired by the Argentine state decision to recreate the Chocobar incident using drones.
“They did not do it because it was so important for the authorities to clap or something like that. This is because the accusation office had acquired new drones, ”explains Martel. “They just wanted to test them. It was totally absurd. “
For the people of Chuschagasta, drones have become a symbol of state surveillance and power, which, according to Martel, was important to challenge by launching its own flying cameras in the sky to capture the indigenous view of events.
“It was a question of overthrowing it and giving to the other version, the other perspective,” explains Martel.
Martel speaks passionately about the use of his camera not only to highlight the voices of the Aboriginal community in Argentina, but also to provide them with the power to create their own reality.
“The very fact that I am the one who tells this story and not an indigenous person is proof that access to cinema and history belonged to the white population,” explains Martel. “It was therefore very important for me to tell this story without trying to take the position in the first person as a storyteller.”
Benchmark I will greatly correct the history books of Argentina and question contemporary ideas on Argentinian identity. For this part, it will probably be controversial work in the country, where far -right president Javier Milei continuously advances attacks on indigenous rights. Last year, Milei also closed the national organization for financing Argentinian cinema, Incaa, to kill dissident projects like Benchmark.
“I come from a region of Argentina with the highest presence of indigenous peoples, it is therefore a theme that was present all my life,” says Martel when he is questioned about the prospect of publishing Benchmark in Milei Argentina.
“No government has never really devoted to finding a solution to the problem of land belonging to indigenous peoples. But this government may be the least sensitive in the last 30 or 40 years. This is why I had to tell this story and protect this film.”
She adds: “It’s an important job.”
Venice ends tomorrow. Discover an exclusive clip of Benchmark above.
