The Cinematheque

Vancouver Premiere

“Eureka is not just an anti-Western, but a decolonized Western, putting Indigeneity front and centre, and forging a new, liberated form that transcends genre.”

Tom Charity, Sight and Sound

The dilating effects of colonial violence in the Americas are artfully explored in this ambitious new work from Argentine auteur Lisandro Alonso. Jauja, Alonso’s beguiling preceding feature, starred Viggo Mortensen as a frontiersman in search of his daughter. Eureka slyly picks up that thread for the first of its tripartite narration, in which a gunslinger (Mortensen) tracks his abducted daughter to a depraved US-Mexico border town. From there (in ways best left undisclosed here), the film shapeshifts into two mesmeric, metaphysically tethered tales of Indigenous life. One follows a police officer and her tenderhearted niece in present-day South Dakota’s impoverished Pine Ridge Reservation. The other sets down in the Brazilian rainforest of the 1970s to witness a tribe of dream readers contend with bloodshed and exploitation. Despite its abstract structure and formal variations (each segment is marked by a distinctive aesthetic design), Eureka delivers a cogent, disquieting meditation on the spectre of colonialism and its instruments of oppression.

In English, Lakota, and Portuguese with English subtitles

The November 5 screening will be introduced by The Cinematheque’s Learning & Outreach Director Chelsea Birks, who has published on Lisandro Alonso’s work.

“[A] time-hopping reverie of Indigenous realities … Heady [and] intoxicating.”

Keith Uhlich, Slant Magazine

“A glisteningly opaque meditation on Indigenous living that refracts viewers’ interpretations as it repeatedly switches gear, focus, locus, and story … [It] bristles with agile ideas and inventive image-making.”

Guy Lodge, Variety