Jauja
Description
A sublime fantasy standing at the intersection of fairy tale and land art, Jauja expands upon the minimalism of Lisandro Alonso’s “Lonely Man Trilogy” (La Libertad, Los Muertos, Liverpool) to arrive at a radical re-imagining of the period piece. The story, co-scripted by the Argentine poet and novelist Fabián Casas, concerns a Danish military engineer (Viggo Mortensen) enlisted to pacify native Patagonia in 19th-century Argentina. As he sets out on his own to find his missing 14-year-old daughter, watching over his shoulder for an insane army deserter, time slows and the period trappings and echoes of ostensibly similar forays into terra incognito (John Ford’s The Searchers, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) melt away to reveal a most peculiar vision quest. Strikingly filmed by Aki Kaurismäki’s longtime cinematographer Timo Salminen, Jauja distills the colors and distances of remote Patagonian landscapes with luminous clarity. Unpredictable until its final shots, Jauja continues to flirt with the imagination long after the closing credits roll. —Max Goldberg
Trailer
Biographies
Born in Buenos Aires in 1975, Lisandro Alonso’s debut feature La Libertad (2001) screened in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival, where it immediately established him as one of the boldest voices of the New Argentine Cinema. In Los Muertos (SFIFF 2005), Fanstasma (2006), and Liverpool (2008), Alonso continued to hone his rigorous and frequently mesmerizing approach to film narrative and outlying landscapes. His most recent film, Jauja, won the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes (Un Certain Regard).