Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka is now showing on MUBI in many countries.
Eureka (Lisandro Alonso, 2023).
A three-part film spanning starkly different locales, eras, and genres, Eureka (2023) stands as Lisandro Alonso’s most ambitious feature to date. It is also quite possibly the director’s most dreamlike—nothing short of remarkable considering its predecessor Jauja (2014). In that spellbinding period piece, a Danish colonial officer (Viggo Mortensen) travels across nineteenth-century Patagonia in search of his missing daughter. Late into the quest, a strange encounter with a wizened Danish-speaking woman suggests the soldier had traveled through time as well as space; a present-day coda makes the film’s timeline and logic even more disorienting.
Eureka features a handful of similar twists. Written by Alonso together with poet Fabián Casas and Martín Caamaño, it begins as a black-and-white western starring Chiara Mastroianni as an infallible gunslinger and Viggo Mortensen as a father searching for his abducted daughter (again). But that preamble, as it turns out, is only Eureka’s first chapter: at a key moment, Alonso cuts to reveal Mortensen’s character on a television set in a living room somewhere in South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. Eureka devotes this second part, shot in color and rooted in a more observational approach, to two members of the real-life Oglala Lakota community: Alaina (Alaina Clifford), a policewoman we follow on an interminable and increasingly sinister night shift, and her young niece Sadie (Sadie LaPointe), a basketball coach itching to flee her home turf. Whether or not she manages to escape is a question Eureka doesn’t answer, at least not explicitly. Toward the end of this section, Alonso finds the young woman sipping some infusion at her grandfather’s, then cuts to a white stork perched atop the roof of the man’s dilapidated house. As the bird takes flight, Eureka follows it all the way to the Amazon basin, where the final chapter is set. It’s another abrupt change in place and time, as the film trades the snowcapped immensity of South Dakota for the lush rainforests of 1970s Brazil. Here, Alonso turns to an Indigenous tribe whose members forage gold and read each other’s dreams, a tranquil life that’s soon shattered by colonialism.
Where the director’s previous works had centered by and large on white strangers plunged into strange lands, Eureka sidelines their perspective to focus instead on the native communities facing those invaders; even the opening oater puts characters under the spotlight that the other films in the genre would traditionally keep peripheral. If there’s any through line to the film’s time- and space-bending journey, it’s Alonso’s interest in teasing out the differences and commonalities in the Indigenous experience from three very distinct enclaves. Eureka might capture life in the Amazon basin as a seemingly benign and organic way of being, but that’s only until white imperialism destroys the community altogether, aligning the film’s last segment with the melancholic mood of its preceding two. Shot by Timo Salminen (the cinematographer behind Jauja) and Mauro Herce (responsible for lensing, among others, Lois Patiño’s Samsara, 2023), Eureka welds the contemplative quality of Alonso’s earliest features, from Freedom (2001) to Liverpool (2008), to the supernatural mystique of Jauja’s climax. Stitching together several long, uninterrupted static shots, Eureka swells into a ghost story of sorts, its solitary wanderers as spectral as the unstable lands they roam.
That it took the Argentinian director nine years to gather enough resources for a new project after the critically acclaimed Jauja speaks volumes about the trials to which the film industry subjects its most idiosyncratic artists. Eureka first showed almost two years ago in Cannes Première, a non-competitive sidebar designed to host titles that didn’t make it into the festival’s more prominent sections. Alonso and I sat down the following day to discuss the film’s visual language, its depictions of reservation life, and the influence of Cormac McCarthy on the project.
Eureka (Lisandro Alonso, 2023).
NOTEBOOK: Eureka has been several years in the making, and I was hoping you could trace its beginnings. Where and how did the film originate?
ALONSO: It all began as I was still shooting Jauja, my previous feature. It’s a two-part film that’s haunted by a near-mythical, rogue colonial officer called Zuluaga, and a group of Indigenous people who travel across Patagonia with him. I remember thinking I wanted to spend more time with them, and regretted not dedicating them more space. I liked them a lot, and they really intrigued me—both from an aesthetic and intellectual point of view. I started wondering: Where have these Indigenous characters been represented in cinema? And, conversely, where have they not? That’s how I landed on the American Western. Mind you, I love the genre in all its shapes—from the US classics to the spaghetti westerns. So we started writing with the idea of making a film that could bring your typical western—a dad looking for his daughter, abducted by some evil figure—in conversation with the present. At the same time, I thought that would make for an interesting coda, a way of situating myself within my own work: Here I am, making a film that speaks to Jauja, another story of a dad looking for his daughter… Or at least that’s how it begins.
I knew I’d have to find a way to pull myself out of that genre, eventually. Again, don’t get me wrong, I’d have loved to make an actual western—but that’s entertainment. And when I shoot, I’m after something else entirely. That’s how we got to the film-within-a-film conceit. We turned the preamble into literal entertainment, a western that’s playing in this policewoman’s living room, without her paying attention to it. From there I began crafting the second part, the one set in the reservation, where the cop lives and works. Only then did I ask myself where the final chapter could fit—the one that takes place in South America. I know it’s easier to think about Eureka as a triptych, but I like to think of it as a single story. I’m aware that the narrative, the way the film is built, tells you otherwise, but for me it’s all a continuum. And since memory is always faulty, I like to think that as time goes by people might end up recalling it as a single, uninterrupted journey.
NOTEBOOK: Was the writing process any different than it was for Jauja?
ALONSO: Well, the script in Jauja was about thirty pages—Eureka’s was roughly twice as many. Though I must confess I really don’t want to write anything bigger than that or else I’ll end up making very long films! [Laughs.] But also, as far as locations go, Jauja only had a handful, and the shoot here was far more difficult. We filmed in different countries, different places, under different weather conditions, with different crews… Not to mention the two COVID waves and all the obstacles the pandemic posed. In purely practical terms, the difference between a four-week shoot in Patagonia and a four-year project stretched across four countries was immense.
Jauja (Lisandro Alonso, 2014).
NOTEBOOK: Just how collaborative was the writing here? I’m thinking about the film’s last chapter in particular, where you train your camera on an Indigenous community. Did they contribute to the script in any way?
ALONSO: Oh, absolutely. That part you’re mentioning was designed to be filmed in the Amazon rainforest, but the minute [former Brazilian President Jair] Bolsonaro took office all funds and subsidies for cinema were canceled, so Brazil was no longer an option. We started scouting more places, but when you change countries you also wind up changing the cultures and people you interact with, naturally. Such diversity was especially present in Mexico, where you have thousands of different enclaves, each with its own language. We ended up working with an Indigenous community, the Chatino people. They too have their own dialect, even though there are few among them who can still speak it, so adjusting to a script—something written by a stranger, and in Spanish—presented them with all kinds of difficulties. But we got to speak plenty. We were able to give them a sense of what the film was going to be about, why we wanted to shoot with them—and that helped them open up a lot. In the end we threw away the script and began a completely different exchange. I’d ask them to tell me about their dreams, and be as precise as possible as to which things would feature in them—trees, nature, stuff they would routinely deal with. That’s how we started to meaningfully interact with the Chatinos and shape that segment together. It took a while to get there. They were very shy, understandably.
NOTEBOOK: And yet their performances feel almost effortless; nothing about them feels stilted or forced. How did you end up working with the Chatinos, and how did you establish that degree of proximity?
ALONSO: We happened upon them thanks to Paola Herrera, who was responsible for casting in Mexico. She had some contacts in Oaxaca, and we traveled plenty across the state, always by car, and organized lots of open calls. To be clear: The specific community you see in the film is fictional—but their way of living, speaking, and carrying themselves in the world is not. Whenever I work with nonprofessional actors, the most important task for me is to generate a level of trust and make them feel safe around me. That was the case in the film’s third segment as well as the second, the part that’s set in the States, where I also cast people who didn’t have prior acting experience. But in both parts there were others who did. In the second chapter you have Chiara Mastroianni, for instance; in the third I had with me Adanilo—a terrific actor from Manaus, Brazil—as well as Márcio Mariante… And they would often encourage those who had never acted before, like the Chatinos, and make them feel comfortable around the camera. That degree of proximity you were referring to was very much the result of the whole team’s efforts, not mine alone.
Eureka (Lisandro Alonso, 2023).
NOTEBOOK: Can I ask about the bird? I was searching for the exact species on my way over, with no success.
ALONSO: Oh, it’s a type of stork, called jabiru, a migratory bird that every year travels from the US South all the way to Argentina.
NOTEBOOK: What made you settle on that bird specifically?
ALONSO: Aesthetic reasons, to tell you the truth. I thought it was just the right size and color, that it would have stood out quite nicely; I knew it would have made for an interesting image once framed against the snow, or against the green of the jungle. Also I wanted a bird that wouldn’t be too obvious, a species that audiences wouldn’t be too familiar with. It has a certain Latin American identity, sure, but it’s not the most obvious choice. Of course, being a stork, it also carries a certain symbolism: rebirth, fertility…
NOTEBOOK: I was hoping you could talk a little about your visual grammar, and especially your proclivity for long, uninterrupted static shots. Where did that penchant begin? And how does that stylistic choice speak to your idea of cinema?
ALONSO: I think it all goes back to the cinematic education I received at university. At the time we first practiced with a Super-8 camera, then turned to 16mm, and finally 35mm. Once you work with film, you know you’re bound to observe a certain rigor, which in turn requires you to establish a montaje interno—an internal editing. I’m not as interested in classical storytelling as other filmmakers might be; my cinema doesn’t work through shots and reverse shots. I prefer relying on the montaje interno and the depth of field. Especially when you’re working with people who’ve never been exposed to cinema, as was the case for my first feature, Freedom. You just can’t bind nonprofessional actors to things like the continuity between shots and reverse shots. You can’t just cut here and resume there. You try to capture life the way you experience it, and crystallize day-to-day moments as they might unfurl before your eyes. That’s something that always stayed with me. Especially in that first film.
Things changed once I began working with Timo Salminen. He comes from a background which I feel is perhaps closer to the traditional studios than mine; it’s almost Chaplinesque. But I think… [Pauses.] I think that the longer the shots and the fewer the cuts between them, the greater the freedom you can give viewers to settle into your scenes at their pace. You give them a chance to decide what to look at, and how. It’s a choice that makes your films feel less telegraphed, if that makes sense. Like it’s harder for viewers to figure out my intentions as a filmmaker. And I think that helps you perceive the Other in a way that’s a lot more frank and straightforward.
I find the approach almost relaxing; it helps me capture more gestures, while also granting me enough freedom to create and imagine the things that characters might be processing.
Eureka (Lisandro Alonso, 2023).
NOTEBOOK: There’s a line in the film that seems to speak to that, when Sadie’s grandfather tells her that the only immutable thing in life is space, not time, because “time is a fiction invented by man.”
ALONSO: Full disclosure: That line wasn’t written by me—it’s one of Fabián Casas’s. But I think it addresses something I feel, which is that spaces help me figure out human beings better than human beings themselves. Especially once they talk; I find that words do not clarify things so much as make them more ambiguous. So by taking in my surroundings, what the environment around me looks like, how the spaces I traverse unfurl, how cities and forests sprawl out, I think I can understand better the people who live there, and my own place in the world.
NOTEBOOK: Another line that stood out is one that Sadie tells Chiara Mastroianni, who returns after the black-and-white preamble as a journalist writing a piece on Pine Ridge. Sadie accuses the writer of giving the reservation “bad press”…
ALONSO: And you can see where she’s coming from. Those depictions are very common.
NOTEBOOK: Right. But don’t you see Eureka’s second chapter as susceptible to the same criticism? Drug abuse, shootings, addictions, domestic violence—you hardly shy away from some of the reservation’s uglier sides.
ALONSO: That’s something I was definitely aware of, and I can see the friction you’re pointing at—but I spent nine years working on this project, and I stand by every scene we shot. We spoke to various people in the reservation about how to approach the material, obtained several permits to shoot there, and negotiated what we could or could not film with some of its representatives. We discussed what we wanted to include in the film, and none of them thought that was “bad press.” All they wanted was for us to show what it’s like to live there. That’s not bad press; that’s asking for help. And in the end they granted me the authority to provide this kind of cinematic relief. Maybe they felt comfortable with me because I was from abroad, I was not from the States. But to go back to your question, it’s hard to show a policewoman’s routine without going through the nastier things she must deal with. I mean, it’s as if you set out to make a film about a firefighter and all you did was show them tending to their garden.
Eureka (Lisandro Alonso, 2023).
NOTEBOOK: The third segment suggests something starkly different, though; you capture the Chatinos’ life in the jungle as a much more peaceful, more contemplative way of being in the world. It’s as if Eureka were painting a stark contrast between an Indigenous person’s life in the capitalist North as opposed to what that might look like in the South.
ALONSO: That’s one way of looking at it, sure. As someone from Latin America, I understand why some might wish to put their lives in danger and travel the continent just to reach a “better” place up North. But that’s often just a mirage, and the living conditions some of these undocumented migrants must wrestle with once they cross the border are absolutely abysmal. I think in the end we’re all bound to face the same questions. Life is short, so how should I try to live it, and where? I’m very privileged in that respect; I’m a middle-class man from Argentina. My worries might seem frivolous to others, but I think in the end what’s most important to me is the journey, not where you end up. How did you live? What did you devote your time to? The film itself stands as a reminder that you can always wake up—as a community, as a family, and share your dreams with other people around you. If no one does that on the reservation, it may be because there’s no time for that, and few dreams you can share in the first place. Bear in mind that the place itself fosters that atomization by virtue of its coordinates and weather… In Pine Ridge, temperatures drop to minus 30 degrees Celsius for several months a year.
NOTEBOOK: How on earth did you manage to shoot there?
ALONSO: It was wild. I’m not sure I’d want to repeat that. I knew we were going to war, and had prepared myself for some harsh conditions, but it was still very, very rough. We lost many days to the weather; it was so cold at times that stepping outside just wasn’t an option. And the cold wound up affecting everyone: those in front of the camera, those behind it, and all those working on the logistics of the set. We were meant to film for something like eleven, twelve days, and we were stranded there for over a month.
Eureka (Lisandro Alonso, 2023).
NOTEBOOK: You worked with two cinematographers: Timo Salminen and Mauro Herce. What about their approaches intrigued you?
ALONSO: Well, Timo I’d already worked with on Jauja, and he’s just a warrior. A genius warrior. He knows what he wants, doesn’t cause conflicts, and helps me solve so many things. The problem was that as he joined us for Eureka he was still recovering from pneumonia, and on the first day of the shoot he just collapsed. The cold was too much, even for someone like him. “Lisandro,” he told me, “I’m not sure I can shoot fourteen hours every night in minus-30-degree weather.” So we agreed to part ways. Luckily Mauro [Herce] was available, and he joined us right away. I’ll be forever grateful to him.
NOTEBOOK: I was keen to hear more about their distinct visions because I think Eureka looks slightly different to your previous films. There are many more close-ups here than in Jauja, for one thing…
ALONSO: Yeah. But that’s because Mauro is more drawn toward naturalism, and Timo is far more punk in his approach. Mauro likes to control the lighting a lot more than Timo, without being too aggressive about it, and likes to rely on natural light. Which leads him to favor close-ups, where he can better control the light. Timo, on the other hand, is very keen on heightening this sense of illusion—he’s the kind of guy that would point a big light directly at your chest. They’re just very different cinematographers. But I think Mauro’s approach really helped to capture the film’s environment, especially on the reservation, where the setting was always penumbral, if not outright dark.
Eureka (Lisandro Alonso, 2023).
NOTEBOOK: I noticed the name Cormac McCarthy in your press kit. Was he an influence?
ALONSO: A very important influence. So much so that there are some exchanges between Chiara Mastroianni and Viggo Mortensen, early on, that borrow from his Blood Meridian.
NOTEBOOK: What drew you to that novel in particular?
ALONSO: I just think that Blood Meridian is the US. It’s the frontier life. The survival of the fittest. A war of all against all. I don’t think things have changed that much since then. The way conflicts are fought may be different, yes, but they keep breaking out in endless cycles. Not to mention that Viggo has already starred in a McCarthy adaptation [John Hillcoat’s The Road, 2009], so that made for some interesting conversations between us. But on the subject of influences… I don’t know. I guess I’m not necessarily influenced by this or that individual artist so much as the worlds they conjure, if that makes sense. I could give you some names, sure, could point to the usual suspects: Lynch, Apichatpong, Costa, Bresson… It’s a big mix, and it varies. But I try not to think about it in those terms, because by now I know that whatever ideas you might bring to the set, the minute you start shooting you’re going to have to throw lots of those out of the window. You finally meet the Chatinos and realize they won’t look you in the eye—that’s when the farce ends. When you have to start from scratch and invent a way out of that. Bresson never worked with Chatinos… So all these preconceived ideas, I find them largely irrelevant. Don’t forget that all the creative collaborators I choose come with their own backgrounds, their own references. In the end it's all teamwork.