There is an opening scene that compels us to step back several centuries, even though the images belong to the present. From very far away, the planet appears as a surface without inscriptions, without cadastral divisions, without fences, and without those imaginary lines that states and markets have learned to turn into destiny. Seen this way, the land seems to belong to no one and, for that very reason, we remember that it almost always ends up being appropriated by someone. What happens when a territory is seen as empty, even when it is inhabited? What kind of violence begins with that optical illusion? One does not need to turn to imperial epics to answer: it is enough to revisit Argentine history, where too often property has counted for more than life and a signed document has weighed more than the memory of a community.

It is at this point that Lucrecia Martel’s film situates itself, not to offer a lesson about the past, but to demonstrate that the past continues to act in the present. The murder of Javier Chocobar, a member of the Chuschagasta Indigenous community in Tucumán, does not appear as an isolated event but as the condensation of a historical mechanism. A man is killed while resisting an eviction, and around that crime a machinery unfolds—designed not to clarify what happened, but to wear down those who demand justice. The question, then, is not only who fired the shot, because that is on record and beyond dispute. The troubling question is another: what kind of country needs so many detours to admit what is evident when the victim belongs to an Indigenous people?

What is most disturbing is not only the violence of the crime, but the naturalness with which the legal order seems ready, once again, to listen to those who historically had the power to name and to appropriate. The trial functions as a miniature of the nation. What confront each other there are not only conflicting versions of a particular episode, but two ideas of legitimacy. On one side, the bureaucratic faith in titles, maps, case files, and legalized inheritances; on the other, the persistence of a relationship with territory that cannot be reduced to a notarial archive. What does the state actually recognize when it recognizes a right? Does it recognize lives, or does it simply recognize papers? In that tension one of the most uncomfortable cores of the Argentine experience is revealed: the difficulty of accepting that Indigenous communities are not a residue of the past or a folkloric postcard, but contemporary subjects who continue to be denied full citizenship.

Martel does not need to underline this inequality too heavily for it to become visible. It is enough to observe how speech circulates, who occupies space with ease, and who must explain their own existence again and again. The courtroom scene, which in theory should be the site of equality before the law, appears crossed by old social and cultural hierarchies. The accused display confidence, even a kind of bodily impunity; the community, by contrast, carries the burden of having to prove not only what happened, but their own right to be there, to speak, to be heard. In this sense, the film touches a distinctly Argentine nerve: the persistence of a racism that tends to deny itself. We like to repeat that we are a mestizo, modern, integrated society, but what happens when an Indigenous community claims land, memory, and dignity? Colonial reflexes or outright hostility quickly reappear.

There is another decisive aspect: the everyday administration of power. It is not only judges, lawyers, or landowners who appear. There are also employees, paperwork, coffee being served, signatures, the banal circulation of an institutional routine that continues its course while, on the other side, a history of death and dispossession is being decided. The coexistence of the bureaucratic and the irreversible produces a devastating effect. As if violence did not always need to manifest itself through shouting or weapons, because sometimes the neatness of an office is enough. In Argentina, many collective tragedies have been sustained in precisely this way: through stamps, delays, technicalities, and excuses. The film understands that injustice is not only an excess, but also a habit.

For that reason the Chocobar case expands beyond those who suffered it directly. What is at stake is not only a homicide but the very narrative of the nation. For decades, official history worked to render the Indigenous presence in the country blurred or marginal. The idea of a white, European Argentina projected toward the future was exalted, while Indigenous peoples were relegated to a distant past or to a peripheral existence. That fiction had concrete effects: it made it possible to justify expulsions, silences, and inequalities as if they were inevitable. Against that background, recovering family photographs, intimate testimonies, memories of work, scenes of everyday life is not a sentimental gesture. It is a political intervention in the archive. It is a dispute over what deserves to be preserved and what deserves to be believed.

Here a valuable question emerges: the dignity of everyday life. Javier Chocobar is not reduced to the condition of an emblematic victim; he returns as a husband, a worker, a man of his community, someone with a trade, with affections, with a life that exceeds the instant of his death. That restitution is fundamental because dispossession begins long before the bullet: it begins when a society accepts that certain groups exist publicly only at the moment of tragedy. Restoring the density of a life is also a way of challenging how power simplifies those it needs to exclude. How many times has Argentina looked at Indigenous peoples only when there was conflict, and not when there was work, family, memory, transmission, a world?

Perhaps this is where the greatest strength of the work lies: it does not settle for denouncing an injustice but compels us to think about the grammar that makes it possible. It confronts us with a country that still confuses legality with legitimacy, document with truth, civilization with dispossession. And it leaves us with a broader unease: if the belonging of a community to its own land can be debated in this way, then how much of the colonial project remains intact among us? The answer offers little comfort. Yet perhaps the deepest merit of this film is precisely that: reminding us, from Argentina and for Argentina, that land has never been a simple landscape. It has been, and continues to be, the place where a society decides whom it recognizes as part of itself and whom it pushes—through respectable arguments—out of the frame.