Story of Indigenous activist’s murder takes top prize at London film festival | London film festival 2025

A documentary about the murder of indigenous activist Javier Chocobar has won the top prize at the London film festival, with the jury calling it a “measure of justice” long denied by the courts.

Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel’s first documentary, Landmarks, won the best film prize in the festival’s official competition, it was announced on Sunday.

The film examines issues of land ownership in Argentina and questions this history’s role in the 2009 murder of Chocobar, a Chuschagasta leader from Argentina’s Tucumán province who fought for indigenous land rights.

It focuses on the trial of three men held nine years after the murder. Candid video shows their fatal confrontation with Chocobar after they served eviction orders against him and hundreds of other Chuschagasta residents from a patch of ancestral land.

The jury, which included the film’s producer Elizabeth Karlsen, praised Martel’s “deep empathy and extraordinary journalistic and cinematographic rigor.”

He adds: “By highlighting current voices and neglected stories, Martel paints a portrait of – and for – an Indigenous community, and grants them a measure of justice that the courts have long denied them. In a remarkably strong competition, our jury is proud to honor this singular achievement.”

Martel has been considered “arguably the most critically acclaimed auteur of Spanish-language art cinema outside of Latin America.” She has directed a series of feature films, including La Ciénaga, La Sainte Fille, La Femme sans tête and Zama.

In 2018, the director spoke to the Guardian about her fascination and shock at the arrogance and entitlement of Argentina’s middle class – which she said was a direct result of the arrival of Europeans in the country. “Even highly educated people can’t make the connection. It’s almost like looking at a wooden boat and not realizing that it was made from trees. We see the wooden boat, but not the trees,” she said.

Other winners at this year’s BFI London Film Festival included Vincho Nchogu’s One Woman One Bra, a humorous tale of one woman’s fight to retain her ancestral land, which won the Sutherland Award for First Feature Film. The Sutherland jury said the film was “at once funny, invigorating and deeply moving; his emotional journey has stayed with us and will continue to do so.”

David Bingong’s The Travelers, an account of the dangerous journey undertaken by a group of migrants from Cameroon to Europe, won the Grierson Prize for best documentary.

The short film prize went to Saïd Zagha’s Coyotes, which tells the story of a Palestinian doctor whose future is turned upside down after an altercation with Israeli soldiers on her way home.