Director Lisandro Alonso Talks EUREKA & Viggo Mortensen on SOUNDS with Tom Needham

SOUNDS with Tom Needham

Traversing time, space and genre, Argentinian filmmaker Lisandro Alonso's EUREKA is an elliptical meditation on the experiences of indigenous communities across the Americas. Opening in a dusty town of the Old West, reality soon transitions to contemporary South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation before finally landing in the jungles of 1970s Brazil. As the triptych unfolds, each temporal and spatial shift provokes metaphysical questions about colonial influence on native peoples and the ever-present tensions between indigeneity and the Western world. The film features three-time Academy Award nominee, Viggo Mortensen.

Born in 1975 in Buenos Aires, Alonso studied for three years at the Universidad del Cine. After co-directing his first short film Dos En La Vereda in 1995, he worked as an assistant director and sound designer until 2000. His first feature film, La Libertad, which focuses on the relationship between a lonely lumberjack and his environment, premiered at the Cannes Film festival, Un Certain Regard. After creating his own production company 4L, Alonso returned to Cannes in 2004 withLos 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 Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival.