Long one of our favorite undistributed films of 2023, Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka has been acquired by Film Movement for a September 20 release. Ahead of this, we have a U.S. trailer that does well to capture the three-headed monster that is the Argentine master’s latest.
As 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.”
Here’s the official synopsis: “Traversing time, space and genre, Argentinian filmmaker Lisandro Alonso (‘Jauja’) presents an elliptical meditation on the experiences of Indigenous communities across the Americas. Opening in a dusty town of the Old West, reality soon transitions to contemporary South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation before finally landing in the jungles of 1970s Brazil. As the triptych unfolds, each temporal and spatial shift provokes metaphysical questions about colonial influence on native peoples and the ever-present tensions between indigeneity and the Western world. Featuring three-time Academy Award nominee Viggo Mortensen, ‘Eureka’ is a graceful refraction of history and place, marking it Alonso’s ‘most expansive and ambitious film to date’ (Screen Anarchy).”
Watch below: