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A documentary about the murder of Indigenous activist Javier Chocobar has taken the top prize at the London film festival, with the jury calling it “a measure of the justice” that has long been denied by the courts.
Argentine film-maker Lucrecia Martel’s first documentary Landmarks won the best film award in the festival’s official competition, it was announced on Sunday.
The film examines issues of land ownership in Argentina and interrogates the role of this history in the 2009 murder of Chocobar, a Chuschagasta leader in Argentina’s Tucumán province who fought for indigenous land rights.
It focuses on the trial of three men that was held nine years after the murder. A candid video shows their fatal confrontation with Chocobar after they served eviction orders to him and hundreds of other Chuschagasta residents of a patch of ancestral land.
The jury, which included film producer Elizabeth Karlsen, praised Martel’s “deep empathy and extraordinary journalistic and cinematic rigour”.
It added: “In foregrounding present-day voices and neglected histories, Martel emerges with a portrait of – and for – an Indigenous community, and grants them a measure of the justice the courts have long denied them. Within a remarkably strong competition, our jury is proud to honour this singular achievement.”
Martel has been referred to as “arguably the most critically acclaimed auteur in Spanish-language art cinema outside Latin America”. She has made a series of feature films, including La Ciénaga, the Holy Girl, The Headless Woman and Zama.
In 2018, the director spoke to the Guardian about her fascination and shock at the arrogance and entitlement of Argentina’s middle class – which she said was a direct result of Europeans arriving in the country. “Even very educated people, they can’t make the link. It’s almost like looking at a wooden boat and not realising that it was made from trees. We see the wooden boat, but not the trees,” she said.
Other winners at this year’s BFI London film festival included Vincho Nchogu’s One Woman One Bra, a humorous account of one woman’s fight to keep her ancestral land, which won the Sutherland award for first feature. The Sutherland jury said the film was “at once funny, life-affirming, and deeply moving; its emotional journey stayed with us and will continue to do so.”
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David Bingong’s The Travellers, an account of the dangerous journey taken by a group of migrants from Cameroon to Europe, won the Grierson award for best documentary.
Meanwhile, the short film award went to Said Zagha’s Coyotes, which is about a Palestinian doctor whose future is thrown into disarray after a run-in with Israeli soldiers on her commute home.
