Phoenix 24
For the Argentine filmmaker, culture should do more than fill empty hours.
Madrid
Argentine director Lucrecia Martel has argued that cinema should recover its ability to challenge audiences, create new forms of understanding and help societies imagine alternatives to the future they are currently being offered. During a series of appearances in Spain, where she presented her first book, Un destino común, and her documentary Nuestra tierra, Martel described culture as a space for resistance against what she sees as growing social resignation.
Her central proposition is that meaningful change does not always require a dramatic revolution. Small actions, alternative ways of producing films and new forms of language can disrupt structures that appear permanent. Martel described these interventions as micro solutions, modest acts capable of creating connections when institutions or dominant narratives make change seem impossible.
She connected that idea to Spain’s recent housing protests, including the eviction of 87 year old Maricarmen Abascal from the Madrid home where she had lived since 1956. For Martel, such episodes can produce a sense of collective powerlessness when people conclude that resistance changes nothing. Her response is to search for forms of cultural and communal action that preserve the possibility of imagining different outcomes.
Cinema occupies a central place in that argument. Martel criticized an audiovisual industry that can make it difficult to finance projects operating outside established commercial circuits. She called for alternative production models and for films that function as more than entertainment or a remedy for insomnia. In her view, cinema can help people understand themselves, recover courage and construct different visions of the future.
That philosophy is visible in Nuestra tierra, her 2025 documentary about the 2009 killing of Indigenous leader Javier Chocobar in Tucumán. The film examines the trial while exploring competing conceptions of land, ownership and collective memory. The Chuschagasta community understands territory as a communal relationship, while the legal system approaches it through titles, individual rights and economic use.
Martel also extends her skepticism toward technology and data extraction. She has spoken about the need to protect personal information from corporations and to develop quieter forms of resistance against systems that increasingly observe and classify individual behavior.
Her broader message is cultural rather than technological. Language, film and collective memory shape what societies believe is possible.
For Martel, the danger is not only that cinema becomes superficial. It is that people lose the ability to imagine a future different from the present.
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