Her political engagement with national narratives—and the connected issues of territorial dispossession—can be traced back to two short films created five years apart. Leguas (2015)—a fiction short that formed part of the anthology film El aula vacía (The Empty Classroom), under the creative direction of Gael García Bernal—addresses school dropout rates in Indigenous communities. The film posits that children fail to return to school due to the climate of fear fostered by the alliance between the educational institution and the landowners who finance it. In the short, the children of the community learn that the local landowner is a “usurper of the land”—one who is seizing over 3,000 hectares of communal territory—because he has “measured the land however he pleased,” disregarding both the 1833 law enacted in Tucumán regarding the standard measurement of a legua (league) and the specific land dimensions stipulated in the 1909 deed.

Likewise, her fiction short film Nueva Argirópolis (2010) presents a series of scenes in which nonprofessional Qom actors in the Argentine Chaco embark on a journey down the Bermejo River to reach a set of islands that belong to no one; along the way, they are intercepted by police. Created as part of 25 miradas, 200 minutos (2010), a commissioned project by the Argentine government to celebrate the country’s bicentennial—which also included work by Pablo Trapero and Albertina Carri—Martel’s short recounts an Indigenous conspiracy to reclaim a land of their own, a land displaced by the flowing course of the river and which moves in tandem with the river’s course, like so many migrant Indigenous populations. 

With Our Land the director definitively joins the ranks of Argentine filmmakers whose work with Indigenous communities centers on land issues. In the province of Salta, director Daniela Seggiaro has been working with the Wichí communities for decades. In 2024, she released her film Senda india, a montage of archival footage shot by Miguel Ángel Lorenzo, a community member who documented the Wichí people’s efforts during a legal trial to prove their land tenure rights. Similarly, director María Laura Vásquez filmed the occupation of the Ministry of the Interior in October 2019 by the group Mujeres Indígenas por el Buen Vivir (Indigenous Women for Good Living), led by the Mapuche writer and land defender Moira Millán. In Vásquez’s documentary La rebelión de las flores (2022), the camera follows 23 women belonging to the Qom, Colla, Wichí, Mapuche, and Guaraní nations over the course of 11 days—women who traveled from their territories in Formosa, Chaco, Santa Fe, Misiones, Salta, Neuquén, and Chubut to the city of Buenos Aires to demand the right to life. Martel’s work, like that of these and other contemporary filmmakers, brings visibility to the still underrepresented history of land disputes and violence against Indigenous communities in Argentina. 

In Our Land, Martel turns to modern vision technologies, such as NASA satellite imagery and drone footage—often tied to ideals of objectivity—to reinforce and question these very techniques of truth construction, especially as they pertain to Indigenous populations in her country. For instance, NASA—as a scientific institution of global renown for capturing images from space (images that have shaped the collective idea we hold of the planet we inhabit)—underpins a “scientific,” “neutral,” and “veracious” truth, characteristic of the documentary genre. Yet these images are not innocent; indeed, they have not been so since their very inception. They function as not merely mechanisms of surveillance but also a specific way of conceiving our relationship with the planet. As Bruno Latour observes in Où atterrir? (2017), a planet observed from a distance—and in its totality—is far easier to exploit. Amidst the global climate crisis, such images foster a sense of detachment—a detachment standing in stark opposition to the intimacy and mutual interdependence with the Pachamama (Mother Earth) that Indigenous peoples have experienced since time immemorial.

For her part, Martel has reflected upon—and indeed positioned herself against—the notion of visual totality: images that powerfully impose a fixed, finished vision of the world. Significantly, her previous films are characterized by a fragmentary framing style in which spaces are typically intimate and immediate, rendering it impossible to glimpse a complete, panoramic setting. As Martel writes in Un destino común (2025), which gathers many lectures and talks she’s given on her filmmaking this past decade, “When I frame something, I try to avoid that sense of totality—the kind that immediately makes us feel, ‘Ah, we’re in the kitchen,’ or ‘Ah, that’s the father and the mother’ [...] I try to withdraw from that sense of certainty, because it seems to me that the moment these things settle into place, a certain state of alertness within the human spirit begins to dissipate” (my translation). It is for this very reason that the NASA images—depicting the planet in its full spatial totality—make us wonder about their use in Martel’s film. During a recent discussion in Mexico, Martel noted that her intention was to emphasize that the land problem is a planetary issue, as evidenced by the armed conflicts and genocides of the present day.

Indeed, NASA imagery situates us within a global framework. Closer to home, Latin America as a whole has endured centuries of dispossession and territorial plundering inflicted on Indigenous peoples—peoples who have raised their voices and organized themselves into movements to reclaim their lands, their sacred sites, their languages, and their knowledge and spirituality, all of which are inseparable from the territory itself. An emblematic case is that of Berta Cáceres, a Lenca leader murdered on March 2, 2016, for opposing the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project on the Gualcarque River in Honduras—a river held sacred by her community. According to a 2022 report by the organization Cultural Survival, approximately 50 Indigenous activists were murdered in Latin America that year alone—a figure representing three out of every four killings of environmental defenders worldwide.

What happens in Tucumán holds true throughout the world. Much like NASA imagery, drones also contribute to creating this atmosphere of veracity and visibility grounded in technology, even as they are now a much derided and overused trope in documentary filmmaking. Playing with such an aesthetic tradition (namely, borrowing a most familiar mode of documentary aesthetics), Martel insists on the drone as an artificial apparatus of vision—or, rather, unmasks it as a producer of artifice. The film deliberately incorporates the mechanical whirring it emits so that the viewer is not beguiled by any purported neutrality or transparency of its gaze.

Nevertheless, by filming from above, the drone’s framing becomes expansive, generating breathtaking panoramic images of the Andes. While this broad framing might seem antithetical to Martel’s cinematic style, the elevated perspective serves as a proposed interpretive lens for understanding the gaze of the mountain’s inhabitants. This is illustrated, for instance, when a couple ascends to the summit of a hill where they intend to build their home, discussing how, from that vantage point, they will be able to watch their children coming and going from school. To an outsider lacking firsthand knowledge of these mountains, they might all appear identical; indeed, certain houses and individuals situated there might intentionally remain unseen. Yet, the Chuschas—the local inhabitants—and the drones share a bird’s-eye view. A keen, all-encompassing gaze is essential in a territory currently under dispute. The drone, then, is not merely an objective, all-encompassing gaze that revels in certainty, but one that instead mirrors the community Martel is capturing with her gaze.

At the 1:45:54 mark, a bird collides with the drone, causing it to crash; nevertheless, it continues to film from the ground, capturing the scene from an angle that disrupts the conventional perspective. The images appear inverted, with the horses shown upside down. It is at this precise moment—for the first time, and nearly at the film’s conclusion—that an off-screen voiceover narration is heard. Although characteristic of the documentary genre, this narration is inserted fictionally, presented as testimony delivered during a legal trial. This testimony summarizes the history contained within the archives of land claims: It recounts the convoluted transfers of land between landowners, instances of expropriation, and the existence—or nonexistence—of official property deeds. Thus, the documentary reveals that one of the landowning families—the Colombres—used receipts for illegitimate leases granted to the Chuschagasta inhabitants as proof of their own “legitimate” tenure. 

This narrative lays bare the murky fabric of the documents used to legitimize usurpation, the very documents Martel uses to present this history. As one of the characters—the cacique Valderrama—puts it, this is how power “muestra la hilacha.” The phrase is a colloquial expression widely used in northern Argentina that signifies revealing one’s “true colors.” The “hilacha”—literally a loose, untidy thread—is an imperfection that, once exposed, unmasks precisely what it sought to conceal. 

The renowned historian Carlos Páez de la Torre also reveals his true colors when admitting—seemingly without remorse, in an interview included in the documentary—that he is unable to verify what he wrote several decades ago in the local newspaper, La Gaceta de Tucumán: namely, that the Chuschagasta people had gone extinct in the early 19th century. Regarding this, he states: “Did I write that? I wrote every day, imagine … if I had to do research to write this stuff, I would die.”