Out of the Competition premiered Friday night, “Eureka” proposes three distinct and interconnected stories.
The film opens with a short black-and-white western, played by Viggo Mortensen and Chiara Mastroianni, Alonso’s fetish actor, with whom the director had met years earlier in the Cannes jury.
With a completely surprising ellipsis, the viewer travels to the reservation of the Oglala Lakota tribe, one of the poorest places in the United States, in South Dakota, where a local police officer is overwhelmed by the suffering and problems of his ancestors.
And from there, in another unexpected leap, to a tribe in the jungle of Brazil, whose members tell each other their dreams at the beginning of the day, and where gold-diggers are at risk.
Take risks
After the premiere, Alonso confessed in an interview with AFP, “I knew it would not be a common film, complex to diagram and structure, and it is not an easy film for the audience.”
Shot in English, Portuguese and indigenous languages, running for 2h30, “Eureka” commands the audience’s attention.
“Well, that’s the idea for me: do things that demand a little bit more of me and try and try and take some risks, even if it’s going to be a lot more tiring,” he continued.
It took nine years for the Buenos Aires (1975)-born director to finalize a script that was made at the end of filming of “Jauja,” a western that attracted attention at Cannes, where Alonso shot all of his feature films. The films are presented in one section or the other. ,
Covid complicated the career of Lisandro Alonso like many other filmmakers.
The toughest shooting, he explains, was in South Dakota, at the end of winter, where the entire crew was caught in a snowstorm.
The Pine Ridge Lakota community has been ravaged by drug and alcohol problems. According to official statistics, 90% of its residents do not have a permanent job.
“People are half-disoriented, looking at what they are going to do the next day, but without any direction or purpose. They are quite careless,” explains the Argentine director, who got to know the community through Viggo Mortensen.
The interpretation of a young Sioux woman comes to the fore, Sadie Lapointe, who casts a serene gaze around the desolation that surrounds her, and who is a key character in the transition to the Brazilian jungle.
“Eureka” coincides with other Indigenous-themed films at Cannes, starting with “The Killers of the Flower Moon” by Martin Scorsese, about a series of murders on an Indigenous reservation in Oklahoma, or ” Los colonos”, by the Chilean Felipe Gálvez. On the genocide of indigenous people after independence.
Alonso declared, “Maybe this is the moment to put the issue on the desk: you can no longer sweep it under the rug because too many people are dying.”
