One of the most-anticipated films to premiere at Cannes Film Festival this past year was Lisandro Alonso’s long-awaited Jauja follow-up Eureka. An epic spanning three different stories across space and time, with a cast including Viggo Mortensen and Chiara Mastroianni, we featured it prominently on our list of the best undistributed films of 2023 feature last month. Now, we’re pleased to exclusively announce that the Argentine director’s most ambitious film yet has found a home.
New York-based distributor Film Movement has acquired the film for North American distribution, with a theatrical premiere planned for Q3 of 2024, followed by release on all leading digital platforms and the home entertainment marketplace. The announcement was made by Michael Rosenberg, President, Film Movement, who recently picked up Bertrand Bonello’s Coma, and Romain Rancurel, Head of International Sales for Le Pacte.
“Since his earliest films, Lisandro has pushed the envelope with his unique viewpoint, blending narrative and documentary structures,” says Rosenberg. “And, since Jauja, cinema aficionados have had a long wait for Alonso’s latest celluloid masterpiece, and they’ll be stunned with Eureka, a visual trip in every meaning of the word.”
Nominated for Best Film at the Munich and Gijon Film Festivals, and an Official Selection at Cannes, the New York Film Festival, Thessaloniki, Mar del Plata, Busan and Rome, Eureka follows Alaina (Alaina Clifford), a Native American police officer in South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. Exhausted from her nightly rounds, she stops answering her radio, much to the chagrin of her niece Sadie (Sadie LaPointe), the local socially conscious basketball coach, who spends the night waiting for her, to no avail. Hurt, she decides that she, too, is weary of her life and with the help of her grandfather––and perhaps a “spiritually freighted” marabou stork––she seeks flight to another, traveling through time and space in an effort to find answers to the vexing questions of life.
Leonardo Goi said in his Cannes review, “Nine years since that underground epiphany, along comes Eureka, a film that, for large chunks, seems to emerge from the same hallucinatory terrain Jauja opened up. Like all its predecessors, this unfurls as a literal journey dotted with solitary wanderers either searching for or mourning lost relatives. (“All families disappear eventually,” Gunnar was told down the cave, a line that might as well double as the director’s motto.) Old tropes and motifs notwithstanding, Alonso’s latest is his most ambitious: a tripartite film, Eureka sides not with the white strangers in strange lands that had long peopled Alonso’s oeuvre, but with the native communities facing these invaders. Its scope is ecumenical, its geography massive. In barest terms, Eureka’s designed to sponge something of, and locate parallels between, the experience of Indigenous communities stranded in three markedly different milieus: the Old West; South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation in the present day; and finally the jungles of early-70s Brazil.”
