Visions du Réel: Lucrecia Martel exposes the fictional traps of non-fiction
Lucrecia Martel was the guest of honour at the 2023 Visions du Réel documentary film festival in Nyon. The Argentinian filmmaker, famous for her fictional work, tells SWI swissinfo.ch that the documentary format represents one of the biggest challenges in her career. Lucrecia Martel is a woman on a mission. When SWI swissinfo.ch asked her about current and future projects during an interview conducted in the first days of the film festival in Nyon, she was straightforward: “To finish Chocobar ”. Martel has been working for over 12 years now on the story of the murder of the Argentinian indigenous leader Javier Chocobar by a white landowner in 2009. This will be her first non-fiction feature, for which she has faced a multi-layered list of hurdles. The film is “very difficult to pigeonhole”, in the words of Martel. “The process of making this film is different from everything I've done so far,” she says. “This one has to do with the historical construction of my country, with...