‘Eureka’ Trailer: Acclaimed Filmmaker Lisandro Alonso Returns With His First New Film In Nearly A Decade

While Lisandro Alonso doesn’t make films that will likely earn $100 million at the box office and attract a massive audience, the acclaimed filmmaker is one of the most interesting and skilled storytellers working today. Unfortunately, we haven’t heard much from the filmmaker over the past decade. That is, until now, as “Eureka” is about to continue its tour of festivals and make its way to the U.S.

As seen in the trailer for “Eureka,” which has been chosen to play at this year’s New York Film Festival, Alonso’s latest tells three seemingly disparate stories across three different eras. Each one, however, highlighting people who have been affected by colonialist violence. 

READ MORE: ‘Eureka’ Review:  ‘Jauja’ Filmmaker Lisandro Alonso Returns With Viggo Mortensen & Chiara Mastroianni For An Inconsistent Triptych [Cannes]

“Eureka” is the first film from director Lisandro Alonso since 2014’s “Jauja.” The new film finds Alonso, once again, reteaming with his “Jauja” star Viggo Mortensen. “Eureka” also stars Chiara Mastroianni, Alaina Clifford, and Sadie Lapointe.

We were able to screen the film at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Though we weren’t completely sold on the film, we did give it a positive review and said, “ It’s an accomplishment already, the fact that this film exists, even if its current state does not reflect the maximum potential of everyone involved, and it has given us some of the most spellbinding images of the year.”

“Eureka” is set to make its North American debut at this year’s NYFF. There’s no scheduled theatrical release, as of yet, as the film is still looking for distribution. 

Here’s the NYFF’s description of the film:

The protean Argentinean director Lisandro Alonso (La Libertad, NYFF39; Jauja, NYFF52) continues to shapeshift, delight, and challenge with his marvelous and immersive new film, which takes the viewer on an unexpected journey through three stories set in wildly different terrain, each of them reflecting lives haunted by the specter of colonialist violence. In the first, Viggo Mortensen and Chiara Mastroianni guest-star in a black-and-white neo-Western pastiche following a taciturn gunslinger seeking revenge in a lawless frontier town. In the second section, in a different kind of law-and-order narrative, set during the present day in the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, we accompany a Native American cop (Alaina Clifford) on her nighttime patrols, revealing a community troubled by addiction and poverty, but also, because of the cop’s good-hearted basketball coach niece (Sadie Lapointe), touched by transcendence. Finally, the film travels to the magnificent Brazilian rainforest of the 1970s, where Indigenous workers pan for gold while articulating their dream lives. Cleverly transitioning between segments without hand-holding the viewer, Alonso has created an improbably unified aesthetic experience that leaves it up to us to make the connections among its transient worlds.