Series Site
April 4–19, 2026
In conjunction with the acclaimed director’s residency at UC Berkeley, BAMPFA presents Lucrecia Martel: Un destino común, a retrospective of her films, including short films, rarely seen on the big screen, that offer insights into her methods and obsession with dislocating the stories that uphold the illusion of a single world. Martel’s atmospheric movies explore the moral, psychological, and social decay of characters willfully blind to the historical violence and continuing social cost they pay for their privilege. In the Salta trilogy, set in Martel’s home province in Argentina’s northwest, middle-class adults exist in an atmosphere of looming threat, self-absorbed and lurching toward self-destruction, as their servants endure and their children are forgotten. Set in the late eighteenth century, Zama (2017) depicts the depravity of colonialism via the delusions of an officer of the Spanish crown. Palpably present in all these films, Indigenous people are the central focus of Our Land/Nuestra Tierra, Martel’s first documentary. A decade in the making, it chronicles, according to Martel, “Argentina’s strategies to deny the Chuschagasta community their territory.” Martel concentrates the film around the trial of the men who killed activist Javier Chocobar in 2009, showing the defense team working to deny the existence of the Chuschagasta, while interviews with community members who share their stories, home movies, and photographs offer irrefutable evidence of their existence. As in her fiction films, Martel’s use of sound immerses the viewer in the cramped space of the courtroom, which contrasts with the expansive drone-filmed lands for which the Chuschagasta continue to fight.
—Kate MacKay and Natalia Brizuela