Three Argentine films, including Lucrecia Martel’s latest picture Landmarks, will premiere at the 82nd Venice film festival, which announced its selection on Tuesday.

Landmarks (original title: Nuestra Tierra), which will play out of competition, focuses on the true story of Javier Chocobar, an Argentine indigenous rights activist who was shot and killed in 2009 while fighting against the removal of his Chuschagasta community from their ancestral land in Argentina. The killing, at the hands of landowner Sergio Amin, was caught on video. 

Martel’s documentary is her first feature-length piece in eight years since 2017’s period drama Zama, which also premiered in Venice. The film unravels the 500 years of history that led to the shooting, and contextualizes it in the land tenure system that emerged across Latin America. The script was written by Martel alongside actor and director María Alché (The Holy Girl, Puán).

“We are grateful to the Venice film festival for being able to show this film we have worked on for so many years,” Martel said in a statement. “We are in a time of great disorientation as humanity; we need to revisit the past. The future is something we can reinvent. There is no life for anyone without a place to live,” she added.

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Two other Argentine films, Gastón Solnicki’s The Souffleur and Alejo Moguillansky’s Pin de Fartie were selected for the official competition of the Orizzonti section. A parallel program to the official competition, Orizzonti focuses on the latest aesthetic and expressive trends in film, with special attention to debut films, indie features and lesser-known cinema.

The Souffleur, Solnicki’s sixth film, features Willem Dafoe playing Lucius, a tenured hotelier of the Inter Continental Hotel in Vienna, where the film was actually shot. Upon learning that his cherished hotel is about to be sold to an Argentine developer who plans to demolish it, Lucius wages a personal vendetta against the new owner.

Pin de Fartie is the latest from Alejo Moguillansky, a director, screenwriter and editor who co-founded Argentina’s renowned indie production company Pampero Cine. His more than a dozen films, usually driven by a humorous tone through a hybrid form of fiction and real life situations and characters, have been screened at festivals such as Locarno, Berlinale, and Viennale, among others. His latest one stars Santiago Gobernori, Cleo Moguillansky, Laura Paredes, Marcos Ferrante, and Luciana Acuña, among others.

The Orizzonti international jury will be chaired by French director and screenwriter Julia Ducournau — whose film Titane won the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 2021 — and includes Argentine film critic and former Mar del Plata film festival president Fernando Enrique Juan Lima.

Last year, Argentine filmmaker Luis Ortega’s Kill The Jockey was selected for Venice’s main competition, where it won an Edipo Re Inclusion and Sustainability Award.

The Venice film festival will run August 27 to September 9, 2025.