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Lucrecia Martel and the New Ways of Telling Everyday Stories

At a press conference for the Argentine film Nuestra tierra (2024) at the 23rd Morelia International Film Festival (FICM), director Lucrecia Martel reminded the audience of the role cinema plays, not only as a social or political medium, but also as what the author called “an alteration of perception.” In other words, the search for new ways of telling everyday stories . “To immerse oneself in the material,” in what is in our neighborhoods, in the way people speak, and not just go along with what the industry and the market suggest. When telling a story, “it is not the plot or the theme that matters; the plot is just a way of organizing time, but that is not the function of cinema. Its function is to make us see again that the things we normalize are scandalous.”

Nuestra tierra is a documentary that follows the assassination of Javier Chocobar, who was shot on October 12, 2009, in the province of Tucumán, while fighting against the eviction of his community from their land in Argentina. His death was captured on a YouTube video.

More than a decade after his murder, Lucrecia Martel recalled that even now, the basic rights of indigenous communities in Latin America are not respected, we see them as something outside our own rights, when the eviction from their lands and the structural problems of the state are also reflected in not owning a home and spending half or more of one's income on rent. 

On this matter, she stressed that cinema is not just entertainment, because when we create, we should think a little beyond who we are working for. Cinema does not have to talk about “universal things; the whole universe is, in a particular way, in the problems and the space we inhabit. Everything that happens around us is exciting.”

She said we have been told the wrong way to create a story, in which we take the idea of conflict, which is a violent concept, as a given. “Great stories have been created this way, but not everything has to be told like that."

She concluded with the idea that we are at an extraordinary moment to do things differently, “Because failure is before us, I believe there will be a generation that will not settle for disappearing. And cinema is a tool for transformation.”

On October 12th, 16 years after Chocobar's murder, Lucrecia Martel was honored during the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM) with the UNAM Film Archive Medal. There she dedicated her work, the screening, and the award to “all the indigenous peoples of the planet.”