Lisandro Alonso

Early films: the "Lonely Men Trilogy" (2001–2006)

Alonso's debut feature, La libertad (2001), was a low-budget production financed primarily with family funds.^[3] Shot over nine days in the rural Pampas with a minimal crew, the film follows the daily routine of a solitary lumberjack, played by non-professional actor Misael Saavedra, a real woodcutter Alonso had encountered. It was selected for the Un Certain Regard section at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival^[4] and was praised by critics as a pioneering example of slow cinema for its unadorned depiction of rural Argentine life.^[5]

After founding his own production company, 4L, Alonso returned to Cannes in 2004 with Los muertos, which premiered in the Directors' Fortnight. Variety called Alonso "the poet and master" of the slow-moving minimalism of new Argentine cinema.^[3] The film also screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. In 2006, he completed the informal trilogy—sometimes called the "Lonely Men Trilogy"—with Fantasma, a labyrinthine short feature set inside a cinema in Buenos Aires, which premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes.^[1][2]

Liverpool and international recognition

With Liverpool (2008), Alonso shifted toward a more fictional approach, following a young sailor who returns to the remote villages of Tierra del Fuego in search of his mother. The film screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and won the Best Feature Film award at the Gijón International Film Festival, whose jury praised it as "a commitment to a radical cinema that takes risks and is seldom catered to by commercial circuits".^[6]

Jauja (2014)

Alonso's 2014 film Jauja represented a significant departure, his first to employ a professional lead actor—Viggo Mortensen—and his first with a period setting, a nineteenth-century narrative spanning Denmark and Patagonia. The film competed in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival,^[7] where it won the FIPRESCI Prize.^[8] Following the film's success, the Film Society of Lincoln Center named Alonso its 2014 Filmmaker in Residence.^[9]

Radcliffe fellowship and Eureka (2023)

After Jauja, Alonso received a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University for the 2016–17 academic year, during which he began developing what would become his most ambitious project.^[5] Through Mortensen's connections, Alonso made repeated visits to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota over several years, researching the experiences of the Lakota community there.^[10]

The resulting film, Eureka (2023), is a triptych spanning centuries and continents, moving from a black-and-white western set in the Old West to a present-day drama on Pine Ridge to a sequence in the jungles of 1970s Brazil, exploring the experiences of indigenous peoples across the Americas. Featuring Mortensen, Chiara Mastroianni, and non-professional actors from the Pine Ridge community, the film was co-written with Argentine authors Martín Caparrós and Fabián Casas. It premiered in the Cannes Premiere section at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival^[11] and won the Fiction Jury Prize at the Lima Film Festival.^[12]

Collaboration with Albert Serra

In 2009, Alonso and Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra participated in a filmic exchange project in which each revisited a previous work using the same crew and actors. The project, titled Sinergias: Diálogo entre Albert Serra y Lisandro Alonso (2011), produced two short films: Serra's Lord Worked Wonders in Me and Alonso's Untitled (Letter to Serra), in which Alonso re-examined La libertad and employed its lead, Misael Saavedra.^[13]