A documentary about the murder of Indigenous activist Javier Chocobar takes the top prize at the London Film Festival

19 October 2025

Landmarks director Lucrecia Martel at the London film festival. Photograph: LFF

The 2025 edition of the BFI London Film Festival marked a striking moment in documentary cinema as Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel’s film Landmarks was awarded Best Film in the official competition category. The jury’s decision signals not only an artistic recognition but carries a deeper resonance: the film resurrects a story of land rights, colonial legacy and long-denied justice. The Guardian reports that the award-winning documentary focuses on Chocobar’s 2009 murder in Argentina’s Tucumán province a case rooted in Indigenous assertion over ancestral land, documented through archival footage, courtroom proceedings and the voices of the Chuschagasta community.

Martel is known as one of the leading auteurs in Spanish-language cinema, and with Landmarks she turns her lens to non-fiction for the first time. The film revisits the moment when Chocobar confronted eviction orders on land claimed by the Chuschagasta community, and captures on investigators’ footage the fatal clash that followed. The trial of three men in 2018, nearly a decade after the killing, serves as one axis of this documentary, which the jury praised for “deep empathy and extraordinary journalistic and cinematic rigour.”

At the awards ceremony the jury noted that the film “foregrounds present-day voices and neglected histories” and delivers “a measure of justice the courts have long denied.” By lifting up the perspective of the Indigenous community itself rather than imposing an external narrative, Martel delivers a film that is grounded in witness, memory and resistance.

Viewed in the context of today’s global film-festival circuit, the triumph of Landmarks is significant for several reasons. Firstly, it affirms the power of documentaries to engage with political, social and cultural histories beyond familiar territories and gives voice to those whose communities are typically marginalised. Secondly, it illustrates that festival juries are willing to recognise films that blur lines between cinema and activism, art and archival truth. Thirdly, the film’s subject Indigenous land rights, displacement, justice delayed remains urgently relevant, not just in Latin America but globally.

Martel’s turn to documentary is itself notable. Her prior feature films, including La Ciénaga and Zama, were celebrated for their subtle, immersive style and radical engagement with class, gender and Argentine history. In Landmarks she retains that sensibility but applies it to a real event the camera watching Chocobar’s community, the land they claim, the legal terrain they face. The effect is both cinematic and prosecutorial, an unusual but potent blend.

The film’s appearance at the London festival also signals a broader shift in festival programming. As major festivals globalise, stories from Latin America, Indigenous communities and regions historically outside the North Atlantic focus are increasingly central. The BFI-London win for Landmarks may encourage programmers, funders and audiences to look further, to cinema that demands engagement rather than spectacle.

In interviews, Martel has spoken about how the land itself fascinated her the way ancestral claims re-emerge in the present, the way the past is sedimented in soil and memory. She once told The Guardian that the middle class in Argentina often fails to link land use with colonial legacy, comparing it to “looking at a wooden boat and not realising that it was made from trees.” In Landmarks she follows that logic: the visible conflict over land is embedded in deeper, older power structures.

The community of Chuschagasta, represented in the film, becomes more than a subject; it becomes a presence. The camera lingers on daily life, on rituals of claim and place, on the fact that for many Indigenous people land is not property but identity. The award that recognises this film thus honours not just a director’s achievement but a community’s story.

For audiences the effects are two-fold. On the one hand, Landmarks offers a gripping and illuminating piece of cinema real-time courtroom tension, archival footage, emotional stakes. On the other hand, it offers a reminder that cinema can still intervene in how histories are told, how justice is imagined and whose voices are heard. In a festival context where premieres and glamour often dominate, a film such as this stands out for refusing distraction.

More than just a milestone for Martel, this award may catalyse further opportunity for Indigenous-led and socially engaged documentaries. It may encourage funders and festivals to support filmmakers working in towns, regions and contexts away from the usual hubs. It may also push audiences to question what they have seen before, what they haven’t, and why.

As Landmarks embarks on its post-festival life perhaps wider release, discussion, impact campaigns its recognition at the BFI London Film Festival ensures its place in both film history and cultural conversation. At its core, the film opens a door into a story of grassroots resistance, legal reckoning and cinematic empathy. And for a documentary to take the top prize at a major festival that alone speaks to shifting expectations of what cinema can and should do.