Critics Campus 2026 participant Jamie Tak speaks to director Lisandro Alonso about audience expectations, the importance of objects and landscapes in his filmmaking, and the influence of Iranian cinema on his work.

Many of your films are preoccupied with movement relating to home – whether this be smaller actions of labour in and around it, such as in La libertad [2001], or travels to or from it, such as in Los muertos [2004] or Liverpool [2008]. What draws you to exploring belonging through movement?

It’s not an easy question, I think, but I will try to give an answer. [For] every film that I start thinking or writing about, I just try to find the right location, where I should move. Mostly, it’s far from my own home, my own kind of circle of culture and citizenship. I live near traffic lights, in a big city; but when I was younger – 11 or 12 – I used to travel from the main city where I live, about an hour-and-a-half away, to spend every weekend with my family, around horses, pigs, and chickens, and I enjoyed every moment of that. I was just waiting to get out from the city, to get into nature, and to see what happened there. So I always enjoyed getting out from my own place, to discover whatever [was] out there. I could take ships, planes, pick-ups, cars … When I get there, I discover why. I get interested in the landscape and how isolating it can be, and how it allows [you to] create yourself [anew]. So my approach is about where I want to put my body and the camera, and then to discover what is happening in these kinds of places. Do they live in a home, behind a tree, near a river? Do they drink water from the river? It’s [about] discovering land for me.

By travelling to these various places over the years, what have you learned about your own sense of self, or home?

Well, the good thing is that when I travel, I can be very far [from home]. Even to different countries. So I think that I try to watch, hear and not talk – to observe what people need. What are their needs? Maybe they will receive something from the government, or from the neighbourhood, or from their family. Or maybe they are never allowed to ask, or to raise their voice, or to fight [in order] to receive a better kind of treatment. I take them as a kind of mirror to analyse how I live, and what amount of [their] sensibility I can absorb in order to be a better person.

Speaking of mirrors, I’ve been thinking about the material objects in your films, such as the key ring in Liverpool, and the toy soldier in Jauja [2014]. Often, they seem to take on an interesting significance, carrying latent desires or histories. You pay a similar kind of attention to animals. What is it about the non-human? Is there a connection between your characters’ inability to communicate, and the ways in which you film these objects and animals which exist outside of human language?

That’s probably very precise. I use objects or landscapes – dogs and things – because, as you just mentioned, they can’t express [themselves] by talking. But they create a lot of meaning when you draw connections: Okay, why is he observing this little toy that he maybe used to play with? [They] evoke different epochs of the characters. For most of these objects, we don’t understand the real meaning. So we need to think through the object about what is in the character’s mind. It makes you work with the film by trying to keep active and drawing these connections – if you are still there. If you leave the cinema, it’s not going to happen. [Laughs.]

Well, in one of the post-screening Q&As, I did hear that [moderator] Cristóbal Escobar once fell asleep in Fantasma [2006].

I mean, this is not prohibited! You can sleep and then wake up, and say: I’m still here, okay? You can have mixed feelings, of your own dreams and the dreaming of the screen …

A dreamed key ring …

Exactly.

Above: Fantasma  |  Header: Liverpool

While most of your films explore the natural environment, Fantasma is a bit of an outlier, in this respect, by being set in an abandoned movie theatre, shot in the bowels of the Teatro San Martín. For me, the absence of a score really laid bare the mechanical sounds of the building, such as the opening of its elevator doors, or the creaking of its floorboards. I wondered if Argentino felt alone. Do you ever conceive of place, or sound, as characters?

Sound puts that film into context. I thought: If I had to take these two main characters [from] my films, what would be the best way for me to do it? Maybe shooting again with them, but [somewhere] not within their comfort zone. So, then, I thought: I am going to take them where I spent two or three years watching films during my university days. I tried to recreate, through sound, those [past] sensations and how [I] perceived the nature of those mechanical elevators, doors, little lights or echoes. [The characters] feel lost there; they cannot control those sounds, because they are not from nature. They don’t know where to go, or how to feel.

That was also the idea [I had] about some films at the time. They were kind of ghosts to me, you know, these ‘outer’ films, less conventional films. I heard about them. I read about them. I could almost smell them, but I could not see them every day, around the corner, in my cinema. Previously, I [had] started feeling that the films that I made were never going to have a huge impact on a lot of people. So I realised: Okay, so if that is never going to happen, then I can play farther than before. I was impressed at that time by Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn [MIFF 2004] and Gus Van Sant’s Last Days [2005], and I realised that films should be sound and images, and that I could do whatever I want. It obliterated any idea about doing any thinking about the ‘conventional audience’, because it [wasn’t for me]. Actually, [Fantasma] was going to be a short film. [Laughs.] But the way I shot it was too long, because I just prefer feeling free.

In relation to conventionality, you have often resisted the label of ‘slow cinema’.

I just prefer not to belong to any particular kind of cinema. But I know it’s a convention to call films which aren’t Marvel films or [narrative-focused] films ‘slow’. Maybe tomorrow they will be called ‘super-slow’. [Laughs.] It depends on what’s happening around us, you know? The different things that get us stimulated. My sensibility reacts in order to absorb and observe things that I want to shoot – so I can’t go faster than those things.

It’s interesting to think about. Is it ever really ‘slow’ cinema? It’s the speed of reality, observing things as they happen. Not slowing things down, not really.

Yeah. And I don’t want to take your nose and tell you what to smell, or what to see, or how to react – how you should see what’s in my frame [from] a particular point of view. I think it’s better to treat people with more respect as an audience, as I think and do my own work through the film.

In looking forward: The Scent of the Pitanga is your upcoming film.

Yes, I’m going back [home] tomorrow to start re-editing the film. It was great to have the opportunity to shoot in Brazil; I was dreaming of [this]. Back when I first saw Taste of Cherry [MIFF 1998], I didn’t know anything about Iranian cinema or [Abbas] Kiarostami. And I said: Okay, this is easy. I can do this. You know, I was so naive. I thought: If I just take out this philosophical suicide issue, I can manage. It’s just one man, one car, a day in a lifetime – easy! Well, nothing is easy …

I always like to go back to where I started feeling things, through the image and cinema. Especially now, thinking of the film as a tribute to Taste of Cherry, and [how] people might define this work, it’s extremely important for me to talk about the values of Kiarostami and Iranian cinema, and the way that they make films. It doesn’t have to be a million-dollar budget. They just shoot with a minimal crew, in [35mm], and manage ideas and poetry at a very high level. So I think it’s more about putting back in [the film] these kinds of values. Also, nowadays, every time I look at the news, everything gets me down. So I think it’s good to rethink the value of staying, to keep breathing – in a positive way, if we can, because it’s not the best world that we have.

Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry deals with questions of fate and agency. Many of your characters fail to meet their narrative objectives, often for reasons outside of their control. When watching your films, are we witnessing the forging of their own paths? Or are they acting as subject to the forces of destiny?

Maybe both … I love leaving the [question of] destiny or fate open to the feelings of each spectator. Did you have a chance to see Los muertos?

Yes.

Well, at the end, when the main character gets into the house, to tend to the kid, some people have told me: “Oh, he’s going to kill him.” And I say to them: “Well, that’s because you are negative.” Maybe he’s going to do something else! You never know. I don’t want to put in my hands the destiny of the character or the final conclusion. Maybe it’s that I prefer questions over answers …

Lisandro Alonso: Frontiers screened as part of the MIFF 2026 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.