The film industry loves a "true crime" narrative. It’s a comfortable, profitable machine. You take a victim, a villain, and a crusade for justice, then wrap it in the aesthetic of a prestige documentary. When the trades announced that Lucrecia Martel—the undisputed queen of Argentine cinema—was finally releasing her first documentary, Chocobar, the consensus was immediate. The "lazy consensus" framed this as Martel venturing into the genre to solve the 2009 murder of land rights activist Javier Chocobar.
They are dead wrong.
Martel isn't "chasing down a murder." She is setting fire to the very idea that a camera can ever capture the truth of a crime. If you’re expecting a South American version of Making a Murderer, you haven't been paying attention to how Martel has spent the last two decades deconstructing the visual language of the elite.
The Myth of the Objective Lens
Most documentaries operate on a lie: the belief that if you point a lens at a tragedy long enough, the "truth" will eventually emerge. We’ve been conditioned by decades of true-crime podcasts and Netflix docuseries to expect a reveal. We want the smoking gun. We want the DNA evidence. We want the catharsis of a verdict.
Martel knows that in the Tucumán province of Argentina—and across the post-colonial world—justice is not a puzzle to be solved. It is a system designed to fail.
Chocobar is not a whodunit. We know who did it. The murder of Javier Chocobar was captured on video. The perpetrator, a white landowner named Darío Amín, didn’t hide in the shadows; he walked up to a group of Diaguita people and opened fire while a camera was rolling.
The "mystery" isn't the identity of the killer. The mystery is why, in a world saturated with digital proof, the colonial structure remains untouched. Martel isn't investigating a homicide; she’s investigating the 500-year-old software that allows a man to commit murder on camera and still feel like the victim of a property dispute.
Why True Crime Is a Form of Erasure
The standard documentary approach would be to interview the family, track the court case, and show clips of the shooting to provoke outrage. This is what the industry calls "impact filmmaking." In reality, it’s a form of voyeurism that treats indigenous pain as a plot point.
Martel’s genius lies in her refusal to play this game. I’ve watched filmmakers blow millions of dollars traveling to "conflict zones" only to return with the same tired tropes of the noble victim. They think they are giving the marginalized a voice. In reality, they are just translating that voice into a dialect that film festival jurors find palatable.
In Chocobar, Martel disrupts the pacing of traditional investigative journalism. She lingers on the landscape—not as a backdrop, but as a witness. She understands that the land itself is the protagonist. The murder isn't an isolated event; it’s a symptom of a spatial sickness.
When we focus on the "murder" as a singular event, we erase the centuries of slow violence that preceded it. By framing this as a crime story, the media accidentally suggests that if we just put Amín in jail, the problem is solved. Martel argues that the problem is the very concept of "ownership" that the camera helps to enforce.
The Failure of Visual Evidence
There is a technical misunderstanding at the heart of how people view Our Land (the international title for Chocobar). Critics talk about it as a pivot for Martel. It’s not. It is the logical conclusion of the sonic and visual experiments she started in La Ciénaga and The Holy Girl.
Martel has always used sound to betray the image. In her world, what you hear is often more "real" than what you see. Chocobar uses this to highlight the disconnect between the "official" record and the lived reality of the Diaguita people.
Think about the absurdity of our current era:
- We have more cameras than ever before.
- We have "undisputed" video evidence of police brutality, land theft, and extrajudicial killings.
- Conviction rates for these crimes remain abysmal.
This proves that the image is not an instrument of justice. It is an instrument of documentation. And documentation is what bureaucrats use to bury the truth in paperwork. Martel isn't using her first documentary to add to the pile of documentation. She is using it to show how documentation is used to lie.
The Contrarian Reality: Cinema Can’t Save Anyone
The most uncomfortable truth about Chocobar is that Martel doesn't pretend her film will change the outcome for the Diaguita. This isn't a "call to action" film.
The industry hates this. Producers want "hope." They want a "takeaway." They want the audience to feel like they’ve done their part by buying a ticket.
Martel offers the opposite. She offers the suffocating weight of history. She shows that the legal system is a theater where the script was written in the 16th century. If you walk out of this film feeling "informed" or "inspired," you’ve missed the point entirely. You should walk out feeling complicit.
The Architecture of the Shot
To understand why Martel is the only person who could make this film, you have to look at how she handles depth of field. In The Headless Woman, she used a shallow focus to mirror the protagonist's psychological dissociation. In Chocobar, she uses the frame to challenge the viewer's sense of territory.
Most documentaries use "B-roll" to fill space. For Martel, there is no such thing as secondary footage. Every shot of the soil, every recorded conversation from the archives, is a brick in the wall of colonial history. She isn't "chasing" a murder; she is waiting for the murder to happen again, because in the eyes of the state, the crime is ongoing.
She rejects the "god-like" perspective of the documentarian. She doesn't narrate the truth to you. She forces you to sit in the silence of the Tucumán mountains until you start to hear the ghosts.
Stop Asking "What Happened?"
The "People Also Ask" sections of the internet are filled with queries like "Who killed Javier Chocobar?" and "Is justice served in 'Our Land'?"
These are the wrong questions.
The right questions are:
- Why do we believe a film can provide justice where a century of law failed?
- How does the act of filming a murder change our relationship to the act itself?
- Is the "documentary" just a more sophisticated way of consuming tragedy?
Martel’s work is a brutal honest answer to these questions. She isn't a journalist. She’s a surgeon working on a corpse that refuses to stay dead. She isn't interested in the "facts" of the case because the facts are common knowledge. She is interested in the sound of the bullet and the silence of the courtroom.
The Verdict on Chocobar
The mistake the competition makes is treating Chocobar as a career pivot. They see a famous director finally making a documentary and assume she's playing by the rules of the genre.
She’s not. She’s subverting them.
She has taken the most exhausted genre in modern media—the true-crime investigation—and stripped it of its most addictive quality: the resolution. By refusing to give the audience the closure they crave, she forces them to look at the systemic rot that no single trial can fix.
The documentary isn't a new chapter for Martel; it's a weaponization of her existing style. She isn't "venturing" into reality. She’s showing you that your version of reality is a fiction constructed to help you sleep at night.
If you want to be entertained by a murder, go back to Netflix. If you want to understand why the world is broken, watch Martel. Just don't expect her to help you fix it.
Cinema is not a courtroom. The director is not a judge. And the audience is rarely as innocent as they think.
