Nuestra Tierra

Recently, for Jacobin, I wrote about Lucrecia Martel’s latest film, Nuestra Tierra (Our Land), a documentary about the indigenous Chuschagasta community in the north of Argentina and their struggle for their land, identity, and dignity.

I find myself, in our increasingly illiterate and attention-starved world, concerned with the failures and limitations of narrative, the way it can obfuscate and even mask the truth. Film, with its capacity for superposition, can manage to exceed the boundaries of linear narrative, embrace complexity, deny clean endings and easy answers.

The piece is about this, as well as about what I believe to be the film’s central question: How is collective identity constructed (or reconstructed) in the long shadow of colonialism?

It’s here and linked in the below image, as well.