With his recent film The Dead Don’t Hurt, Viggo Mortsensen sought to explore the Western genre from an immigrant perspective. And did so quite successfully, if you ask me. Now Mortensen is tackling a very different kind of Western role in Eureka, groundbreaking Argentine director Lisandro Alonso’s story of Indigenous communities impacted by colonialism across time and space.
It would be easier just to show the synopsis than try to explain what Alonso is doing with Eureka.
Traversing time, space and genre, Argentinian filmmaker Lisandro Alonso (Jauja) presents 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.
Mortensen plays Murphy, a father in search of his kidnapped daughter in a lawless border town in 1870.
Joining Mortensen in the cast are French superstar Chiara Mastroianni, Alaina Clifford, Sadie Lapointe, and José María Yazpik.
Eureka opens in select theaters on September 20th.
