The good thing about the London Film Festival is that while Q&As rarely allow time for more than one question—most often none—filmmakers are always kind enough to stick around and chat after the screenings. My second and final ticket for this year’s edition (people who find it hard to get tickets for Wimbledon make me laugh, try the LFF) gave me the chance to speak with one of the most important directors of our time, whose work I’ve admired enormously ever since I came across her magnificent Zama.
So there I was, all ears, the conventional host of congratulators—professional huggers and cheek-kissers—finally subsiding, the underground Q&A for certified disciples just superseding.
A good twenty minutes in, as a point was being made on the thematic parallel between Zama and Nuestra Tierra, I dropped a vaguely philosophical consideration that Lucrecia expanded upon, offering a key not only to her latest, but to her oeuvre as a whole. ‘El problema es de espacio,’ she said, her gaze piercing through the smoked lenses of her characteristic cat-eye frames, ‘ya no de tiempo.’ While time is liable to be manipulated—because it belongs to narration, and narration, technically, is a lie—space is where our identity both as individuals and as groups can still be sought. Perhaps the thread that binds the film, poder is a word she repeatedly used. From the opening view of planet Earth to the granularity of a crime trial, often gliding over the beauty of a seemingly unclaimed territory, Nuestra Tierra feels steeped in a vivid preoccupation with ownership, birthrights, and roots. I found her remark about how drones have come to resonate with military purposes quite chillingly spot-on, and timely. The arresting music that opens the film—as far as I could find, a composition by the Argentine composer Ariel Ramírez—introduces the subject with a sense of mournful sacrality and echoes unresolved, distant issues. The colonial problem, crucial in itself, is transfigured by Lucrecia’s poetics into the existential, reminding us that this is as much about la historia inscribed in the land as it is about the way its people perceive themselves through it. As her recent projects cry out loud, there is something profoundly human, ancestral, and yet pioneering in the urge to reclaim a scale that our era has shrunk to the domestic, the device, or even the virtual.
It was only a bit later, on my solitary walk from the station home, wrapped in the smell of dried leaves and a night not yet too cold, that I realised the question ‘what is land, really?’ was lingering in my mind, somehow intertwined with two images—Don Diego de Zama’s stare towards the end of the ocean and Nuestra Tierra’s breathtaking aerial views of the rural landscape—until a condor snatched the camera and carried it all away, leaving me with an exhilarating kind of meaning I can’t quite articulate, and yet still feels so vivid.
