Feeling and Solitude: Lisandro Alonso on Politics, Film Funding and ‘Slow Cinema’
The subject of a major retrospective at MIFF 2026 – Lisandro Alonso: Frontiers – Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso has followed his own uncompromising filmmaking path for 25 years, crafting minimalist, observational representations of solitude (chosen or otherwise), colonisation and life on the land.
MIFF Publications Manager David Heslin speaks to Alonso about the ideas that motivate his work, the challenges of finding backers in an age of transnational funding and the importance of taking time to connect with what we see onscreen.
The first thing that struck me about your films is the isolation of the men who inhabit them; they’ve exiled themselves from their society, but at the same time still have this longing for lost connections. What is it that draws you to that solitude, and how do you think about these characters as people?
The first thing that I always think about when I start figuring out what or where to shoot is mostly places I’ve found where people have chosen to be isolated from society. Then I travel to those places – [like] Corrientes in Los muertos – that are mostly out of the city where I live. So I travel there: I take my car and I drive, or I take planes, and try to stop, take notes and see what I can learn from those places and the people who live there.
When I go to those places, I start thinking about why they choose to be out there, and whether I can find my own connections between them and a guy like me who lives in the city – I try to use them as a mirror for me to understand how it is to live nowadays, wherever they happen to be.
In Liverpool, for example, one of the questions that the movie asks the audience, and me, is: why is it that a character like Farrel – who travels all around the world, including to the biggest capital cities – once he gets back to his own place, cannot talk to his relatives? Does he have a problem of communication or of showing feelings to those who raised him, or is it the environment he grew up in that has made him feel that way?
Obviously, I use these characters to ask questions of myself, too: why can’t I [always] communicate well enough with the people I really feel something for? This problem of communication is one that I think we all have in terms of getting along with neighbours or family or the people around us.
When you started making feature films in the early 2000s, there were some very interesting things happening in Argentinian cinema – the El Pampero Cine collective, Lucrecia Martel and Matías Piñeiro were all also emerging. Has there been a difficult relationship in Argentina between this more radical cinema and the institutions that support filmmaking?
We’re all looking for different things in the same places, to find funding sources to make our films. Mostly, we find sources outside of Argentina, and try to apply to different countries in order to co-produce films. Nowadays, it’s getting more difficult for different reasons. But it depends; every one of us just chooses a path to keep making our films.
For example, the last film I made, Eureka, I think was a five-country co-production [editor’s note: France, Argentina, Germany, Portugal and Mexico]. It was kind of complex for me, because I’m used to feeling a lot of freedom in making films; I have to get along with every rule from every country and institution that we receive money from. In the beginning, I made a film every two or three years; [with Eureka], it took me 10 years to finalise the film.
Was that because of funding issues?
Funding, but also COVID – I shot that film in three or four different countries, and every country had different COVID protocols – and different crews; I travelled from Spain to Mexico and from Mexico to the US waiting for the weather conditions to make the film, and for the places and the environment to be right for me to shoot the film. Sometimes, when I shoot with non-professional actors, it also takes a lot of time for me to get involved with them, to share the project.
Above: Eureka | Header: Jauja
Around 2010, there was this critical discourse that emerged about so-called ‘slow cinema’, which categorised your work alongside that of Béla Tarr, Carlos Reygadas and others. It’s a loose framework to bring together a kind of cinematic storytelling that immerses us in an environment, involves us in processes or work and makes us more conscious of the passage of time. Do you think that’s a useful way to talk about this kind of filmmaking?
I admire those filmmakers, but they’re [not] trying to find a lot of answers in things. It’s the other way around: through time and space and cinematography, they try to ask some questions for themselves and the audience at the same time. They try to work with the images and the rhythm of the images in order to give a space to the audience to work with the film and try to find their own connections.
For example, when I was younger and starting to make films, I was influenced by many different filmmakers, especially Iranian cinema. Right now, I’m editing a remake I just shot of Taste of Cherry by Abbas Kiarostami, so obviously I was inspired by him; a lot of [those] images form a statement of what I really like in cinema.
Nowadays, most of the filmmakers that I know have to go to different platforms to finance their ideas and keep shooting. It’s getting more and more difficult for us to make the films that we want to make, especially compared to when we started thinking of films when we were younger; it’s difficult to find a platform. Everything changed from 25 years ago: distribution, technology, places to show our films and ideas. That’s why a film festival like this and so many others are extremely important for us as a platform to communicate and to share with the audience.
Which filmmakers working today do you find most exciting or radical?
I’m more in touch with people I’ve known for 10 or 20 years – I could mention filmmakers, even if they’re not here anymore, like Béla Tarr or Kiarostami – but I get a lot of influence from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Carlos Reygadas, Miguel Gomes, Albert Serra, Pedro Costa, Alice Rohrwacher … many others. I’ve been influenced mostly by directors who still have their own ideas and are not thinking just of launching their work at a film festival in order to [achieve] a good sale for platforms, or to get the biggest reaction from the audience.
Above: Double Freedom
I’m interested in the role of politics in your films. If we can conceive of politics as being about social relations, what role do you see the disconnected, isolated man – of the kind we see in so many of your films – occupying within a political system?
I thought about that in the film that I just finished [Double Freedom], which is a sequel to my first film [La libertad]. Those [men], women, children, families who try to avoid being part of any system, they are in the same place; they cannot refuse any political decision from Milei, or from any other government. Even if they’re living in a very isolated way with minimal resources, just surviving, they are going to be touched by decisions from the government or from other countries, or by the ideas of anyone else who rules. It’s impossible to run away from that. So I think it’s important for me to start talking about how people are affected by others’ decisions – not only political decisions, but economic decisions, cultural decisions, how we try to communicate with each other: as a father, as a friend, as a brother, as a member of any community.
In Double Freedom, Misael’s sister provides an example of that, right?
Actually, that was a coincidence, but I could [sense] that something like that would happen – especially as the government of Milei has now decided to cut resources from those institutions. You can see how much that affects anyone, but particularly the people who have less: they cannot handle it, but they cannot even argue, because they don’t have the tools to; they just have to assume that that’s [now] the thing and that they just need to keep going, even when they know – and we know, through the film – that the end is not going to be a happy one.
This kind of government that cuts social services also tends to be very hostile to arts and cultural funding. We seem very far away from any kind of society that values art for its own sake, without any economic purpose.
For sure – but nevertheless, when we think about an idea, it can take us one, two, three, four, five, 10 years to make [the film]. So there must be something really important there for us to keep putting our own energy and time into it. There’s something honest and vital in that idea, a necessity in that feeling. So I trust in that kind of feeling to make films through that kind of energy.
That’s why, for me, film festivals are still the strongest places to show the kind of work that reminds us that images can be useful to express feelings – especially nowadays, when everyone has a phone in their hands and it’s so difficult for us to [maintain] attention to something for more than three minutes. But I still believe that that’s my work. I still try to give a chance to the spectator, if they find the time, to make their own connections – and it takes time; it takes work, and it takes a lot of energy for us to grow up. It’s like life: it takes time to understand and to have experiences and to learn from our own movements and our way of being here.
I always remember a quote from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: “Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation.” The faster things get, the less space there is for feeling. I think perhaps your cinema can teach us a little bit more about that.
Exactly. If we give ourselves the chance to trust that there is someone else behind the camera trying to push us to do our best to understand what is happening, and to witness what is happening with the characters, that helps us to maintain ourselves as viewers, as cinephiles.