Review: For her first documentary, 'Our Land,' Argentina's Lucrecia Martel chases down a murder

In the fragmented mysteries of the great Argentine filmmaker Lucretia Martel, her explorations always start with sensory flashes: faces, spaces, objects, sounds in transfixing procession.The language is its own, resulting in disorienting but undiluted depictions of the worlds of modern elites (“La Ciénega,” “The Headless Woman”) and 18th century colonists (“Zama”) alike.But now, with her first feature documentary, “Our Land (Nuestra Tierra),” Martel unravels a political crime and the larger offenses behind it with a vital clarity.

The film is centered on the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar, an Indigenous Chuchagasta man from Argentina’s northwestern Tucumán province, who was shot while defending his ancestral homeland from a thuggish incursion.The weight of the issue at hand — stolen land, territorial rights and the overdue recognition of a colonized country’s original peoples — brings out a tantalizing lucidity from the typically elusive Martel on a serious subject that requires discipline.In one sense, she’s dealing with a rights issue too painful to be aggressively aestheticized, but she’s also exploring a blood-soaked injustice that can’t be treated conventionally.

She begins, in fact, with rolling satellite images from space — as if to say: This appropriation of nature is the world’s problem, not just Argentina’s.Movies The Argentine director is revered at home and abroad — and even took a meeting with Marvel.

Her first documentary, “Our Land,” investigates a murder.What follows, toggling between a courtroom and vast, contested land (filmed with dreamlike urgency by cinematographer Ernest de Carvalho), is a righteous, visually arresting swirl of fact and feeling, past and present.

It’s also anchored by the stories of a community desperate to claim territory they’ve cultivated for centuries.“Our Land” is as honorable a documentary as you’re likely to encounter this year about what fighting looks like in ...