The Spanish language has a single word, historia, that can mean both “history” and “story.” In Argentina, where the military dictatorship that disappeared thirty thousand people between 1976 and 1983 remains prominent in collective memory, the reconstruction of democracy has depended on an ongoing public and political negotiation between historia’s two meanings — one more stable and objective, the other more malleable. Revisiting, amending, and correcting official narratives is a familiar element of public discourse; one of the earliest artistic incarnations of this negotiation is the Oscar-winning 1985 film La historia oficial, which depicts the discovery by a middle-class woman of the fact that her adoptive daughter had been stolen from a woman imprisoned, and likely later killed, by the military. By pressing it up against the authoritative, totalizing adjective “official,” the film’s title surfaces the word’s ambiguity.Argentine director Lucrecia Martel’s latest feature film, Nuestra Tierra (Our Land), is similarly concerned with historia’s inherent instability, training its focus on a less-examined part of Argentina’s past: the colonial era and its impact on the country’s indigenous population.The film follows the 2018 trial for the murder of Javier Chocobar, an indigenous leader and activist of the Chuschagasta community in the Tucumán province in the north of Argentina. Chocobar was killed by a bullet that ruptured his femoral artery in 2009 during a confrontation between a group of Chuschagastas and three businessmen who had shown up on their land to make good on a specious claim to it. One of these men, the one who fired the fatal shot, wanted to mine the land for slab stone.These facts are established quickly, early in the film. But before we get to any of that, Martel sets the tone with a heroic opening shot of the Earth from outer space. This is how it starts: thousands of miles away, our point of view floating next to a satellite, then descending, registering the way untouched landscape gives way to parceled plots, and then, finally, to a soccer field where young Chuschagasta women play soccer. We’re in a specific place, the camera says, but what we’re about to see happens all over the world.Martel began working on Nuestra Tierra in 2010, after seeing a video of Chocobar’s murder on YouTube; Darío Amín, the man with the putative deed to the land and the gun in his hand, had recorded the raid and then, for some reason, uploaded the incriminating footage to the then–five-year-old website. This clip shows up early in the film, as do the accused: Amín, as well as former police officers Luis Humberto Gómez and Eduardo José Valdivieso. Martel shoots them mostly from the back, and when we do see their faces, they look scared and angry; they cow to the judge and condescend to their accusers.The official story, according to them, is simple: Amín’s family was one of several in the region with land titles dating back to Argentina’s colonial era; on that day in 2009, he was simply taking back what was rightfully his. They went peacefully, the men say, apparently not perceiving any discrepancy between this assertion and the fact that they were armed, Gómez with not one but two guns hidden on his body. Martel doesn’t have to do much to set them up as the villains; they readily tell on themselves and the systems that created them, Gómez at one point affirming that “the Argentinian state taught [him] to do that” (“that” being attack an unarmed person who stepped toward him with his arms open and his palms facing outward). Like all villains, they suffer from inferiority complexes — “My weapon is large! My gun is large!” Valdivieso yells at one point during the trial — and premise their might on crude and ill-constructed power structures, namely the postcolonial processes through which the Argentinian state disenfranchised indigenous people not only from their land but from their very identity.This last point — unlike the facts of the case, which Martel establishes quickly and efficiently — is developed slowly and carefully throughout Nuestra Tierra, in a considered, deliberate tone that mirrors the process of making the film itself. Martel spent years forming relationships with the Chuschagasta community; it is from this effort that the film’s central revelation starts to emerge. The question at the heart of the trial is not whether or not Amín, Gómez, and Valdivieso were responsible for Chocobar’s death, or even who had a claim to the land. It is whether or not the Chuschagastas exist.While Amín and co.’s lawyers mount a defense that rests on the assertion by a tucumano historian that the Chuschagastas were wiped out entirely by 1807, Martel shows the community as they are: in their houses, on their land, at work. An elderly Chuschagasta woman spreads out hundreds of photographs on a table in front of her, an archive of community memory and proof, since proof is necessary, that they’ve long been living on the disputed land. Martel stages conversations between community members during which the extent of their losses becomes clear, as does the still-nascent process of grieving their lost identity.“Realizing that we come from our ancestors has been hard for me,” says one Chuschagasta. “No one ever explained to us that we were indigenous,” says another. He continues: “And few people said that we were here, now.” “They’ve taken from us even our way of speaking,” another Chuschagasta man retorts, referencing the Cacán language, likely extinct since the seventeenth century.Martel puts these moments together with a light but deliberate hand, montaging sound and image in the evocative and often disturbing way that has become a hallmark of her work. Microphone static starts off quietly and then becomes deafeningly loud, right before the verdict is read; a coasting, swiveling drone acts as our eyes on the land, its incessant whirring making it impossible to forget the fact of its imposition on the territory; when a bird smashes into it, we shake and spin along with it and then float up again, our perspective now turned upside down. Martel exploits film’s disorienting and accretive capacities to suggest that truth might be more complex and harder to pin down than official historical narratives would have us believe.In one particularly nauseating moment, she layers a sound bite of one of the trial lawyers citing the work of Carlos Paez de la Torre, the historian who claimed that the Chuschagastas were wiped out by 1807, over a shot of Paez de la Torre himself, who, after the layered sound bite concludes, callously quips: “I wrote that? Ha. If I had to research every day to write one of these things, I’d die.” Elena Perelli de Colombres, the other historian referenced by the defense, is similarly obtuse in her assessment of the Chuschagasta community: “How could they prove what they are? They haven’t preserved their language, not even their own names; they don’t have any distinguishing physical features.” Martel plays this last sentence over a shot of a group of Chuschagastas sitting together in the courtroom, looking strikingly alike.The continued denial of the existence of a whole group of people who are sitting right there in the courtroom, who live on the land Amín wants, who are keeping him from taking it for himself, is maddening. And it takes a lot to sustain: laws, educational curricula, land titles, textbooks, signatures, notaries. Nuestra Tierra pokes hole after hole in this framework, revealing its rigidity and fragility to be bound up inextricably with one another.Film, with its affordances for fragments and overlap, can produce a more capacious, and likely more accurate, version of events and simultaneously demonstrates how brittle linear narratives can be. Nuestra Tierra doesn’t try to fight colonial logic on its own terms but rather fights it on the terms of the Chuschagastas. How is collective identity constructed, when the official story insists on denying it? A clue might lie in one of the last shots of the film, which shows the Chuschagastas rallying to demand justice for Chocobar; together in struggle, their existence becomes undeniable.