Nuestra Tierra

EN

“The world appears bent on self-destruction. Hatred reignites with war promises, fuelled by arguments steeped in celestial rhetoric. Again, some believe a divine order dictates their claims over human neighbours. Global shifts and rapid technological leaps have accelerated history beyond our grasp. What is humanity’s importance? Our destiny? Reason offers no refuge, delegated to machines not fully intelligent, yet speaking our language. It is very easy to get confused. Those in power embrace nationalisms, sparking wars and forced migrations. This may be our greatest, possibly last, adventure: finding a common destiny for Earth. We each inhabit a space, close to neighbours. Deep in my heart, I envision this film for machines that require complex narratives to be kinder than us. We need new narrative structures that don’t endorse the conflict-driven opposition that leads to war.

This film addresses our mother tongue’s racist mechanisms, which deny many access to vital space. The language of documents – lives lost to dubious papers and futile bureaucracy. A historical document is a script for a non-existent scene, serving its signers. Cinema can be useful here, that’s my deepest wish.”

Lucrecia Martel1

Flavia Dima: I was really struck by how the film continues the overarching themes in your work – chiefly, the legacy of colonialism and postcolonial structures within Argentine society that have been seemingly erased by modernity, or absorbed into society in more subtle, less overtly violent forms. At the same time, another major concern here is class structure. How have these themes, which have preoccupied you from the very beginning, found their way into Nuestra Tierra?

Lucrecia Martel: Look, I entirely agree that there is a continuity of interests with the things I did before. Perhaps, in this film, a sense of urgency emerged from encountering the pain and the needs of that community. It was an urgency that felt different from what I experienced when making my fiction films. This difference was also shaped by the circumstances the country was going through: a succession of economic crises and an ever-increasing precariousness of the population. As such, the urgency was of a different nature. I don’t know if I could have made a fiction film about this. That’s one thing. Let’s consider that I had used the same tools as in fiction for the narrative construction. Even then, I think there was something in the very matter of the trial, and in all the material my team and I were gathering; not just me, but collectively: the photographs, the documents. There was something in there that felt extremely rich. If I had tried to transform all of that into fiction, I would have lost a lot of that richness. That’s why I ultimately decided to make a documentary film. I did consider, for a moment, whether I should make a different kind of film.

Then there’s another thing about fiction. Let’s say that once you’ve made extensive use of the resources fiction offers, something within historical discourse becomes very visible: the patterns of history. The official history of any country is a myth, and myths are made with fiction. In that sense, I found the language of fiction very useful for untangling the myth of the nation’s foundation.

Flavia Dima in conversation with Lucrecia Martel2

• 1

  Lucrecia Martel, Director’s Statement.

• 2

  Flavia Dima, ““Official history is a myth, and myths are made with fiction.” A Conversation with Lucrecia Martel,” Sabzian, 4 February 2026.[/fn]