Strand Releasing To Open Lucrecia Martel’s Award-Winning Documentary ‘Our Land’ In The U.S. On May 1

EXCLUSIVE: Lucrecia Martel’s award-winning film Our Land will be coming to U.S. theaters on May 1, Strand Releasing announced today. The feature documentary is set to open initially at Film Forum in New York City, kicking off a limited national rollout.

Our Land premiered under the English language title Landmarks at the Venice Film Festival last year. It went on to win the top award at the BFI London Film Festival, as well as an award in international competition at Locarno, and a special award from the National Society of Film Critics.

“Martel’s probing documentary Our Land unravels the story of Javier Chocobar, a member of the indigenous Chuchagasta community in northwest Argentina’s Tucumán Province who in 2009, tried to defend himself and his people from being forcibly evicted from their land by a local landowner and two former police officers,” notes a release. “As a result, the 68-year-old Chocobar was shot and killed, and two other community members were wounded.”

The release continues, “In her expansive and enlightening first feature documentary, Argentinean filmmaker Lucrecia Martel takes a sweeping approach to this tragic true story, triangulating the murder trial of the three men, the lives of Chocobar and his fellow Chuchagasta people, and the centuries-old, colonialist legacy of land and property theft across Latin America. With a ravishing, at times vertiginous visual approach to filming the natural beauty of the contested land, Martel pays cinematic tribute to people whom others systematically tried to erase from history.”

In conjunction with the release of Our LandStrand Releasing also announced it will re-release Martel’s 2008 narrative film The Headless Woman“which has been restored in a new 4K transfer overseen by Martel and the cinematographer, Bárbara Álvarez.” The Headless Woman has been named one of the best films of the 21st century by the BBC.

Strand Releasing’s Marcus Hu commented, “We’re thrilled that Martel’s The Headless Woman has been lovingly restored with Lucrecia and Alvarez’ control for a definitive version of the film and that it will have a theatrical release around the world.”

Strand Releasing handled the original theatrical release of The Headless Woman in 2008 following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and the company also distributed Martel’s film Exist in 2017.

Our Land was produced by Rei Pictures, Louverture Films and Piano, in co-production with Pio & Co., Lemming Film, and Snowglobe.

After the Venice Film Festival premiere, Martel screened Our Land at the Camden International Film Festival in Maine. She participated in a Q&A afterwards, noting of the documentary’s themes, “The Indigenous communities of South America, at least, have lived with this feeling of a total lack of response to the most basic things a human being needs, such as space to live, space for animals, space for their crops. So, the idea behind this film was, of course, to collaborate with that community, with the Chuchagasta community, which has a long struggle for its territory, but it was also about trying to understand ourselves, as Argentinians, and the situation of these communities. It’s not only important for us to understand what the Indigenous communities are going through, but also to understand our exact place in that story.”