Jauja
A revisionist western interrogating colonisation, Alonso’s beguiling historical feature reinvents itself with a mystifying final act.
Captain Gunnar Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen, Crimes of the Future, MIFF 2022) is a Danish military explorer, charting the lands of Patagonia in the late 19th century. Travelling with his teenage daughter, Ingeborg (Viilbjørk Malling Agger), Gunnar feels under constant threat from Spanish settlers, Indigenous peoples and the myth of Zuluaga, a Danish officer turned wilderness-dwelling killer. When Ingeborg disappears into the desert with a Spanish soldier, Gunnar heads after her alone. Coming face to face with both hostile men and a hostile landscape, he grows increasingly lost and desperate.
Winning the Un Certain Regard FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes and chosen as one of Cahiers du Cinéma’s top 10 films of 2015, Jauja marked Lisandro Alonso’s first work of historical cinema and his first collaboration with Mortensen. Though its vignetted corners and Academy frame give the film an antique appearance, Alonso’s fifth feature is a revisionist western that, in using genre tropes to reflect on the colonisation of Argentina, takes narrative turns as enigmatic as they are unexpected.
“Part meditative, realist anti-western, part metaphysical Tarkovsky-esque head-scratcher, Lisandro Alonso’s fifth feature is an arthouse masterpiece with enough traditional narrative momentum to hold sway before delivering a mystical one-two punch of mind-bending abstraction.” – The Skinny
Writer/director Lisandro Alonso is a guest of the festival and will be in attendance at the Friday 14 August session of the film.
Tickets
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