The work of the Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel is none too easily parsed, but a few of her peeves, at least, are crystal clear: she abhors colonialism, disdains bourgeois entitlement, and is no fan of the establishing shot. Some filmmakers, in laying out a story or toggling between locations, are almost patronizingly eager for us to get our bearings. Martel is the opposite. With little ceremony and even less exposition, she will drop us into a buzzing, teeming hive of activity, cultivating a feverish, miasmal disorientation. The opening moments of her début feature, “La Ciénaga” (2001), unfolded as a discordant symphony of visual and aural fragments: wine sloshing in a glass; deck chairs dragged noisily across patio tiles; saggy sunbathers shuffling about in zombie-like unison. You didn’t know yet where you were—the northwestern province of Salta, where Martel was born and raised—but, on a deeper level, you did: an enclave of middle-class decadence, sweltering its way toward decay.

What a surprise, then, that “Our Land,” Martel’s fifth and latest feature, should boast a bounty of establishing shots. The first one unfolds with serenely contemplative grandeur: here is the International Space Station, hovering far above the Earth’s blue surface. In time, the camera will descend, giving us sweeping aerial footage of Tucumán, a small province at Salta’s southern edge. This cosmic perspective is an unusually lofty gesture for Martel, but then, “Our Land” is an unprecedented undertaking: it’s her first nonfiction feature, and reality has forced a few adjustments to her methods. Martel began planning the film while working on “Zama” (2018), her epic adaptation of Antonio Di Benedetto’s novel of the same title. Both films, though entirely different in form and focus, share a blistering denunciation of colonialist oppression and a commitment to ushering Indigenous lives out of the shadows of Argentinean history.

“Our Land” is a record of a terrible crime and a long-delayed punishment. On October 12, 2009, a man named Darío Luis Amín—accompanied by two former police officers, Luis Humberto Gómez and Eduardo José del Milagro Valdivieso Sassi—sought to evict members of the Indigenous Chuschagasta community from what he claimed was his property. During the ensuing confrontation, Amín fatally shot Javier Chocobar, a sixty-eight-year-old Chuschagasta activist; several other men from the community were shot and injured. Chocobar’s murder was filmed by Amín himself, using a camera that hung from a strap around his neck. He subsequently uploaded the video, which appears in “Our Land,” to YouTube. Martel first watched it online in 2010, and after that she began digging into the events behind it.

Martel’s filmmaking process brought her into close contact with Chuschagasta families, who, over the course of many years, entrusted her with their stories, plus the materials, mostly photographs and documents, that she would use to tell them. We learn much about Chocobar from his widow, who speaks of her husband with lingering affection, describing his hard work as a sugarcane farmer, his love of photography, his gentlemanly charm, his playful sense of humor. Her reminiscences accompany photographs of Chocobar in earlier, happier times, and these scenes dovetail with other interviews and donated materials to achieve a loose, warm-spirited portrait of a community. “I took these photos to keep a record of the times of trouble that the community was going through,” a Chuschagasta man notes, and, as “Our Land” sifts through such traces, it, too, becomes an unofficial archive—a vast storehouse of evidence that Indigenous people have farmed and lived on this land for generations.

But for decades, as some of Martel’s interviewees note, their presence on the land has come under threat from the Amíns of the world: we hear about specious claims of ownership, attempted evictions, exploitation of Indigenous labor, and frequent seizures of land, livestock, and crops. (We also hear of the Chuschagasta activists’ efforts to resist by filing lawsuits, leading to years of protracted legal and bureaucratic tedium.) Martel’s film places these events within the context of a systemic dehumanization and erasure of Indigenous people across all aspects of Argentinean life. In one scene, a church tour guide speaks of a mural that depicts Tucumán’s Indigenous warriors as bloodthirsty raiders of civilization, righteously struck down only by divine intervention—as if, one listener says, “even God wants to erase us for good.”

Amín, Gómez, and Valdivieso were brought to trial in 2018, nine years after Chocobar’s death—an astonishing delay. Still, a justice of sorts did eventually arrive: all three defendants were convicted and imprisoned. Though they had a brief reprieve after a successful appeal, in 2020, their conviction was eventually upheld, and Goméz and Valdivieso returned to prison in 2025. (Amín died from COVID in 2021.) Much of “Our Land” is devoted to the trial, and Martel crosscuts between the film’s two strands, community panorama and legal drama, putting them into sharply dialectical play. Her sly implication is that there is more truth to be excavated from memories and off-the-cuff accounts than from official documents and public hearings.

It’s in the trial footage, though, that Martel exerts her signature formal acumen most forcefully. She duly captures the entitled bloviations of the accused, who frame themselves, unsurprisingly and unpersuasively, as the victims. Pointedly, though, the film continually lingers on the faces of Chuschagasta community members seated toward the back of the courtroom, reacting mostly in silence, and often with tears, to witness testimony. The very layout of the room becomes a microcosmic vision of larger social inequities: privileged Argentineans in a noisy position of dominance, Indigenous men and women positioned quietly at the margins. Here and there, Martel singles out the mundane practicalities of courtroom activities: a man cleaning a table, another serving beverages. The inherent dignity of work, especially work that typically goes unnoticed, is anything but incidental to the film’s concerns.

Martel has an interest in letting the seams show, and in questioning the mechanics behind cinematic conventions. Throughout “Our Land,” she and the director of photography, Ernesto de Carvalho, make use of a drone-borne camera to take in the vast, sun-baked expanse of Tucumán. Notably, though, they don’t simply employ landscape shots as filler, as is de rigueur for so many documentaries. We’re never allowed to forget that the drone is a drone; we’re reminded by the robotic swivelling movements of the camera, and by the loud, whirring noise of the machine that Martel, a master of sound design, refuses to omit. It’s not lost on her that drone technology has long been an instrument of surveillance and warfare; she has appropriated the eyes of neocolonialism in order to gouge them out. In one shrewdly unredacted moment, the drone gets knocked sideways by a bird, sending the camera off balance—and suggesting that, one way or another, the invader will be removed.

“Our Land” is the work of a great filmmaker exploring the boundaries of a relatively unfamiliar form. “The Headless Woman,” Martel’s richly suggestive drama from 2009, finds her in full, terrifying command of a medium whose limitations—the edges of the frame, and of perception itself—become the very foundations on which the story and its many mysteries rest. (A gorgeous 4K restoration produced by Rei Pictures, with support from the Museum of Modern Art and the U.C.L.A. Film & Television Archive, will screen May 3rd, 8th, and 17th at Metrograph.) Early on in the film, Vero (María Onetto), a wealthy middle-aged white woman, drives down a winding road through Salta, alongside a bone-dry canal. Briefly taking her eyes off the road to answer her phone, she runs over something, perhaps two somethings. She stops the car, glances at her side-view mirror, and, for a moment, seems to register what she’s done—and then she retrieves her sunglasses, which fell during the impact, and drives ahead. She doesn’t look back, though the camera does; we see a dog lying dead behind her. We also know, from earlier in the film, that there were three Indigenous boys playing with a dog in the area.

I’ve replayed this scene numerous times over the years, sometimes counting the number of car jolts (at least two) and sometimes taking note of the ghostly handprints on the driver’s-side window. (There’s an innocent explanation, but the sight is chilling nonetheless.) Each time, I’ve marvelled at the cool, diamond-hard rigor of Martel’s staging: it’s one of the great, unsettling action sequences in modern movies, exactingly composed and timed, suffused with dread, and as frightening for the information that it withholds as for what it reveals. What gives “The Headless Woman” its extraordinarily hypnotic power is the way it sustains this visual precision even as Vero herself gets lost in a fog. For most of the film, she exists in a state of concussive shock; her memory seems to shut down, perhaps as a temporary defense against her guilt. Not long after fleeing the scene of the crime, Vero stops her car and gets out, and as she slowly paces left and right, raindrops spatter her windshield—an eerie expressionist flourish that both advances the plot and evokes a deep psychological rupture.

Maria Onetto in “The Headless Woman,” from 2008.Photograph from Strand Releasing / Everett Collection

Those raindrops presage the onset of a full-on storm, which proves crucial to the plot: the weather is severe enough that no one seems to take immediate notice of roadkill—or, for that matter, of anything that might be floating in a now-filled canal. The elements conceal Vero’s crime, but, as Martel subtly insinuates, a more deliberate coverup is already under way. Shortly after the accident, Vero is examined at a hospital and then retires to a hotel for the night; in both instances, she is driven by someone who is never identified, and we can sense the ranks closing around her. Eventually, Vero arrives back at the well-appointed house she shares with her husband, Marcos (César Bordón), whom she runs from at first, as if she doesn’t recognize him. As in more than a few amnesia films, our ignorance of the protagonist’s background brings us into a heightened state of identification. The emerging details of Vero’s life—a career as a dentist, an extramarital affair—have a sneaky way of catching both her and us off guard.

It will be at least a few days before Vero tells Marcos what we have already suspected: “I killed someone on the road.” Has she recovered her memory—and her conscience—at last? Or has she merely realized that, by dint of her status, she is immune to the consequences of her confession? “The Headless Woman” is intricately yet elusively constructed—the first time you see it, nearly every scene unfolds like a puzzle within a puzzle—but its political implications are unmistakably direct. What connects the individual sequences, and what ultimately connects this film to “Zama” and “Our Land,” is Martel’s attention to disparities of race and class: she insistently draws our attention to the Indigenous servants and other workers operating silently at the margins of Vero’s breakdown. The movie’s darkest joke is that it scarcely matters that the woman has lost her head; her comfortably sheltered existence doesn’t require her to have one.

Onetto died in 2023, at the age of fifty-six, in what was ruled a suicide. Her performance in “The Headless Woman” remains one of the great achievements of her tragically shortened career; few actors have so richly and subtly pinpointed the sinister currents that can underlie a frozen smile. It’s a performance that, owing to Martel’s brilliant visual inflections, unleashes a tide of cinematic associations. Vero, a bottle blonde, evokes the femme-fatale duplicity of Kim Novak in “Vertigo” (1958); the critic Phoebe Chen, writing in the film journal Another Gaze, astutely likened the character to Gena Rowlands’s psychologically fraught heroines in John Cassavetes’s “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974) and “Opening Night” (1977). Revisiting Martel’s film again recently, and struck anew by her utter mastery of mise en scène, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk, with their boundlessly empathetic critiques of stultifying bourgeois repression. In “The Headless Woman,” a simple shift in coiffure or color—from the bold, self-implicating red that Vero wears before the accident to the muted sea-green she dons in the guilty aftermath—can convey a world of meaning, even as it condemns the superficiality of her suffering. Vero’s tormented conscience, in the end, is merely an imitation of strife. ♦