Power is like those fine cashmeres, it’s hard to see the threads. “Our Earth”the latest film Lucrecia Martel Based on the murder of community member Javier Chocobar at the hands of a landowner who claimed to be the owner of the property inhabited by the indigenous community of Chuschagasta in Tucumán, it dismantles a plot that includes the fight for justice, the right to territory and the assumption of one’s own identity. In the middle is time, the decade that Martel dedicated to this project that has just been released in our cinemas, but also the years that poison the wait, eating at the heels of the living and the dead.
Whose land is it? Of the one who has the title to the property, of the one who works it or of those of us who live here on Earth as in heaven? Lucrecia Martel, our greatest living director, unfolds her questions in this talk.
News: Does the film reveal the mechanism for constructing a truth, the way in which a fictional story can be established as true?
Lucrecia Martel: Look, what you ask is interesting because for me cinema is a super powerful tool, but it becomes weak when it is a mechanism for replacing one truth with another, when in the face of certain facts I come to tell you the opposite and affirm it. The most interesting power that cinema has is precisely to show you how true ideas are established and dismantle the scaffolding, not to contrast plot weights. I think that what cinema can do, and that is why I think it is so valuable for these moments where the planet is in the greatest darkness I have ever known in my life, is allow us to observe how statements that seem definitive are built. Did you see when in the movie they say: “On such a date the Chuschagasta community ceased to exist?” That is held to be an absolute truth and then the person who wrote such a thing does not even remember saying it. You look at how fake news has existed since time immemorial, it is supposed to be true, but the thing about news is that it is a little false, you see? They appear very organized by those who want to impose an idea, a vision of what is happening in the world. Cinema has something fantastic and that is that it allows you to see how the story is put together, how that plot is woven.
News: For years many people wondered how the Holocaust or the atrocities of the civil-military dictatorship could have occurred. Are we now closer to knowing how those things happened without society reacting?
Martel: Yes and it’s terrible. It’s terrifying because you say, how easily it happens! How naturally we all begin to justify one thing or the other, that is tremendous and I feel that it is like that in all countries. The other day I was giving a class to 60 kids from different continents and the stories of those young people who live in different cities had something in common: fear and uncertainty. It is a time to think about these questions, we come with a political tradition in our nation: an enemy is always built on which to base all the vices and failures of the country, the names change, but the figure of the enemy remains. That way of thinking does not help us move forward as a country, the only thing it does is consecrate the idea of the crack. And I believe that on a day-to-day basis the rift is almost never corroborated in any family, because there have always been people on one side and the other, but you are still family, life does not stop. There are ideas that one confronts and that have consequences in daily life, that is true, but the rhetoric of the enemy is a painful excuse in our history.
News: In the cinema, if you don’t work as a team and build agreements, you are lost. Is thinking something like this on a social level a chimera?
Martel: Of course you have your own point of view, but I am convinced that you can get ahead with different visions. It is incredible, we have spent 200-odd years as a Nation without being able to agree on fundamental things, and one of them is education. How do you get ahead without education? We all have our ideas, someone may even say: “I am against ESI”, well, reality will be in charge of explaining to you whether it was a good or bad idea (laughs) But the need for youth to have ways of judging the truth that is emitted through technology is a central issue. Now there is a technological truth built by artificial intelligence, the limits of reality have blurred. How can we not have a consensus regarding that?
News: While you were talking, I was thinking about the power of the image, at one point in the film someone says that men liked to take pictures of themselves. In cinema, are men still the owners of the image?
Martel: Do you know that I didn’t suffer from it? I think it was because that whole generation of directors like María Luisa Bemberg and Lita Stantic preceded me. In my confusion at the age of fifteen I saw that they were so successful, imagine what the success of “Camila” had been like, for example, and I grew up fantasizing that cinema was a woman’s profession. Look at the ignorance! (laughs). This gives you the idea that there are fantasies in culture and that sometimes a misunderstanding turns them upside down. That is, I imagined that cinema was a thing for women because of my adolescent experience, at that time María Luisa and Lita spoke everywhere, they were in the media, they were the ones with the most viewers and their films had an impressive resonance. But I do perceive something in cinema and it is the difficulty in granting agency to women’s characters. It’s like a cultural thing, they are meant to be the wife, the friend, the sister or the lover, those are the variants.
News: In “Our Land”, a member of the Chuschagasta Community says that he looked in the mirror and had a hard time recognizing himself as indigenous. It’s like when you think you see your mother’s reflection in the elevator mirror, but if you look closely, that lady is not your mother, it’s you. Does your identity sometimes fall on you like a brick?
Martel: (Laughs) Listen to this, it’s funny, it happened to a friend of mine who is Uzbek. During Stalinism, part of the Korean population was forced to move to Uzbekistan. She was born and raised there, she is fourth generation in Uzbekistan, completely Korean in appearance, but trained in Soviet education. It turns out that about fifteen years ago a Russian journalist died, murdered by the regime, a guy who was from Moscow. And she realizes, after seeing it in the media, that she is not the same as this man who has been killed, but that she looks like Asians. She says that until that moment she had never noticed that she was physically different from others.
News: Reality is stranger than fiction
Martel: Yes, because a population, to survive, not only economically but also with regard to its self-esteem, can take refuge far from its identity. The person who appears in the film needed to distance himself from the word indigenous in order to rebuild himself and it is totally understandable, although it is also obvious that this conflict will be very hard. I believe that understanding the moment where you finally recognize your identity is much more valuable than stating things as if you had always been clear about who you were. Society wants indigenous people to be the desired Indian, the perfect Indian, the Indian who preserves their ancestral traditions. With this film we wanted to open spaces for questions and understand that the purity that urban people expect from the indigenous world does not exist. That is an absurd fantasy, a misinterpretation resulting from ignorance about what happened in the country throughout our history.
News: While many kids here know an alternative history through TikTok, in Brazil a film like “The Secret Agent” emerges that vindicates memory and roots. It has it all, suspense, pain, humor, songs, Carnival, it is a love letter to the identity of a country
Martel: I saw it and I tell you, it seemed like a moment of Brazilian joy. I enjoyed it a lot, you feel all the time the enormous love that director Kleber Mendonça Filho has for Brazil. There is the essence, the music, that Brazilian happiness despite everything and in the worst of times. And it comes to you because you live it body and soul. For me, those two terms, body and soul, are inseparable. I don’t believe in the existence of intellectual cinema because when a film impacts you, it’s not just in your head. My great spiritual concern in these times is that we settle for such minuscule happiness. I think that cinema can serve to see this possibility, we can imagine a happiness greater than this, based on the common good, the curious thing is our inability to carry it out. Because when you imagine something, half of the work is done.
