Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel (“La Ciénaga,” “The Holy Girl”) has spent her career turning landscape, class, and social rot into something uncanny. With “Our Land” (“Nuestra Tierra”), she will bring that sensibility to nonfiction for the first time, and now the film is finally heading to U.S. theaters. Strand Releasing will open the documentary at Film Forum in New York on May 1, with a limited national rollout to follow.
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The film centers on the 2009 killing of Javier Chocobar, a member of the Indigenous Chuschagasta community in Argentina’s Tucumán Province, who was shot while resisting an attempted land seizure. Martel’s documentary expands outward from that murder, triangulating the trial of the three men charged, the lives of Chocobar and his community, and the much longer history of colonial land theft across Latin America. That gives the film a scope that is both intimate and systemic—one violent crime, and the centuries of power behind it.
What makes the project especially intriguing is that this will be Martel’s first feature documentary after a body of fiction work that already treated sound, space, and offscreen power as political tools. Festival descriptions of the film have emphasized its ravishing visual approach to contested land and its broader reckoning with colonialism’s afterlife, suggesting “Our Land” will be less a conventional issue documentary than a continuation of Martel’s longstanding cinematic concerns in another form.
The U.S. release will also be accompanied by a new 4K restoration of “The Headless Woman,” Martel’s 2008 feature, overseen by the filmmaker and cinematographer Bárbara Álvarez. That is a smart pairing: one of Martel’s most disquieting fiction films returning alongside a documentary that appears equally focused on erasure, violence, and the structures that make both possible.
Martel wrote “Our Land” with María Alché, and the producing team includes Benjamín Domenech, Santiago Gallelli, Matías Roveda, Joslyn Barnes, Julio Chavezmontes, and Javier Leoz. The film premiered on the fall festival circuit in 2025 and will now begin its U.S. theatrical run this spring.
“Our Land” opens at Film Forum in New York on May 1, 2026, with a limited nationwide rollout to follow. Watch the trailer below.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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