Watch Viggo Mortensen in the trailer for Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka

Directed by acclaimed Argentine auteur Lisandro Alonso (who wrote the script with renowned Argentinian authors Martin Camaño and Fabian Casas), the film reunites the director with Academy Award nominee Viggo Mortensen (Green Book), who starred in the director’s 2014’s Cannes award-winning Jauja. The film also stars French actor Chiara Mastroianni (2019 Winner of the Un Certain Regard Best Actress award for On a Magical Night), Sadie Lapointe and Alaina Clifford. It had its World Premiere at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

Alaina is tired of being a police officer in the Pine Ridge Reservation and decides to stop answering her radio. Her niece Sadie spends a long night waiting for her, to no avail. Hurt, she decides to begin her journey with the help of her grandfather: she will fly through time and space to South America, finally she will stop watching old black and white westerns that do not represent her in any way, and everything will feel different when she hears the dreams of other people, those who live in the forest. But there will be no definitive conclusions… Birds don’t talk to humans, yet if only we could understand them, they would surely have a few truths to tell us.

Described by Screen Anarchy as Alonso’s “most expansive and ambitious film to date”, the first section of Eureka is a richly-textured old-style Western, shot in monochrome, reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man; from there the film glides into the modern US in full colour, with Alaina Clifford as a disgruntled cop on a Native American reservation… and then time travels back to a 1970s Brazilian jungle.

Like Sovereign’s 2022 acclaimed slow cinema release Memoria, starring Tilda Swinton, EUREKA is a wonderfully opaque and mesmerising film experience that rewards viewers with its triple-stranded storyline brought to life with mesmeric, dreamlike cinematography (by Timo Salminen and Mauro Herce Mira) and soul-searching performances.

Lisandro Alonso was born in 1975 in Buenos Aires. He studied for three years at the Universidad del Cine. His first feature film La Libertad premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes. He returned to Cannes in 2004 with Los Muertos, which premiered in the Directors Fortnight. Two years later, he completed his trilogy with Fantasma. In 2008, the director decided to lean toward a more fictional approach with Liverpool, following a young sailor looking for his mother in the lost villages of Tierra del Fuego. Five years later, Jauja, set in 19th century Denmark and Argentina and starring Viggo Mortensen, won the FIPRESCI award in the section Un Certain Regard.

Lisandro Alonso’s extraordinary EUREKA will now be released in select UK cinemas on 16th February 2024.