The acolytes of the Argentinian author Lucrecia Martel are used to patience. In 25 years, she has only made five characteristics, the last one, the long -term “benchmarks”, is her first foray into non -fictional cinema. An increasingly exasperated dismantling more and more exasperated from a horrible murder case underpinned by the privilege and colonialist prejudices, it also requires the patience of its viewers-although it rewards them with an increase in emotional impact and a long vision of Latin American history which transcends any trapping with true crime. Compared to Martel’s more formally radical fiction films, it is a directly built work, but a disciplined and clear work. Obviously, an exciting project for the director, he nevertheless avoids sentimentality or animated rhetoric on a subject with high issues.
The name of Martel guarantees the general exhibition of the Arthouse for a documentary which will be omnipresent on the festival circuit after its first off competition in Venice, with program slots in Toronto, New York and San Sebastian have lined up, as well as a place in the official competition of London. No prior familiarity with his work is required to engage with “benchmarks”, which is accessible and not manipulated both in his approach to human interview and his political commentary to the point. The title of English language feels more oblique and sapphaly distant than the film in its approach; His Spanish counterpart, “Nuestra Tierra” or “Our Land”, is closer to the brand.
It begins with an unexpected and cosmic development: a satellite plan of the earth seen from space, settled on ecstatic choral music, before descending in the herbaceous and undulating slopes, the fields and the fortune football fields in the northwest of the province of Tucumán de Tucumán, interviewed by a drone floating in the northwest. An agricultural region fertile historically inhabited by the Aboriginal people of Chuschagasta, it has also been for centuries of dispute between these guards of origin and the colonists of European origin, with whom the Argentine authorities have long. These are tensions that continue to play today, for which Martel presents as proof of the 2009 shooting of the chief of the community of Chuschagasta, 68, Javier Chocobar – a tragedy causing a trial for prolonged murder which gives “benchmarks” his narrative vertebral column.
The three authors are the rich local landowners Dario Luis Amín and the former police officers Luis Humberto Gómez and José Valdivieso. A disturbing but overwhelming brutal free video shows their fatal confrontation with Chocobar after having served expulsion orders to him and 300 other residents of Chuschaguasta of a large plot of ancestral lands.
The images are overwhelming, but that does not simplify the legal procedure, which only started in 2018, nine years after the fact, and led to the best in compromised justice. Martel, who takes a co-writing credit with Maria Alché (her head lady of the “The Sainte-Fille” of 2004), is not particularly interested in fine procedural details, and the film, which is mainly dispensed with names on the screen and explanatory chyrons, often leaves his audience to sail in a tangle of parties and conflicting interests, and to determine the right side.
The gaze of the film becomes more intimate and particular when he proves the community of Chuschuaguasta still under the name of the murder, and gives his most generous platform to the widow of Chocobar, Antonia – who speaks lucishly not only of her husband, but of her education as a native woman and her eternally unstable status in the Argentine population. The photographs of his personal archives illustrate his descriptions of a persecuted but durable person very well, and a lifestyle built by hand who now disappears before their eyes. These will are crucial in an even slower wider society to ratify their experience: about her schooling, Antonia deplores the fact that she has never taught indigenous history. “Instead, they teach us who discovered America,” she said with regret.
Earlier in its development, the “benchmarks” were conceived as more than one hybrid project built around the history of Chocobar, before Martel obviously decides that a non -temperate documentary form would best serve the frank facts of the case. You can sometimes feel its film filming against non-fiction restrictions, or perhaps simply against frustrating truths-its restraint in this regard, however, gives the film a moving humility, especially when it recovers to the voices of Chuschagasta to tell their own story. The director gives a key poetic freedom in the vast photograph of drones of the film. A sur-used assignment in the much modern document, it turns out here an effective and rather committed device, offering a properly omniscient vision of the earth which survives all those who are fighting.
