Lucrecia Martel: “Cinema is a powerful tool of transformation”

Visiting the Morelia International Film Festival, Lucrecia Martel explained what led her to get involved with a case of dispossession of an indigenous community for more than a decade that is portrayed in her debut as a documentary filmmaker. Our land.

“Indigenous people are seen as if they were exotic people who have nothing to do with you,” he said. “And the problem of land expulsion is not very far from the problem of the number of young people who are not going to have a home for many decades, but rather their entire lives, and who are going to spend half of what they earn or more to pay rent.”

Martel documents the trial against those responsible for the murder of the Argentine indigenous activist Javier Chocobar occurred in the community of Chuschagasta, Tucumán, in northern Argentina. The person accused of shooting him is a businessman who sought to develop mining exploitation on the lands inhabited by the Chuschagasta. Chocobar’s death was recorded on video and broadcast on YouTube. Those images were the impetus to make the film.

The filmmaker’s team was present on all days of the oral and public trial over the course of a year and a half. He also consulted with Chocobar’s relatives and his community while immersing himself in the legal world. “We had to get in touch with a court case involving thousands and thousands of pages,” he said. “A judicial case is to immerse yourself in an incomprehensible world for many moments, absurd.”

Martel decided to have great historical support thinking about the non-indigenous Argentine public. “It is curious, but we must constantly prove to Argentina that indigenous communities exist,” he said. “The identity of the indigenous claim is difficult for the Argentine population to accept.”

The documentary was presented on Sunday, October 12 in Morelia, the same date on which Chocobar died and on which the arrival of the Spanish to the American continent is commemorated. That same day there was a demonstration with indigenous people from Michoacán, the Mexican state whose capital is Morelia. The demonstration turned violent when protesters hijacked a tour bus and police responded by pepper-spraying nearby passers-by and festival-goers.

Lucrecia Martel He was aware of this situation and regretted that these measures were taken against the protesters. “Yesterday they were sprayed with pepper spray, they were all intoxicated,” said the filmmaker, who was awarded the Medal of the Film Library of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

The director of The swamp, The holy girl, The headless woman y Exist He responded enthusiastically to questions posed to him by young aspiring filmmakers.

“Storytelling with images and sound is something very powerful, I believe in that. And I think there is going to be a generation that is not going to be satisfied with disappearing. We (the older ones) would seem so,” he said. “I believe without a doubt that cinema is a tool of transformation.”

He also asked them to abandon the idea that all films must be universal to work. “There is a stupidity that grew like an exotic plant, which is believing that cinema has to talk about universal things… the only one that is concerned about the universal is the market, which needs to sell everything in the greatest possible vastness,” he said.

Martel also questioned what is explained by the idea of ​​conflict and why that idea is so embraced in the film industry. “It is a warlike idea that is great that it exists and there have been great things done with that idea, but it cannot be the only thing,” he said. “When a way of telling becomes hegemonic, the only thing that will happen is that contempt for the other will arise, because everything human is going to be analyzed as a conflict, as a confrontation… That is a lie.”

Source: AP