Container #27 Eureka
...along with our upcoming screenings and notes on turmoil at the Berlinale
Hello. Thank you once again for joining us.
Next Tuesday’s Screening:
Eureka, Lisandro Alonso, 2023, 146m
Alaina is overwhelmed by her job as a police officer on the Pine Ridge Reservation. She decides not to answer her radio anymore. His niece, Sadie, waits for his return for a long night, in vain. Sadie, sad, decides to start her journey with the help of her grandfather. She takes off in time and space towards South America. She will no longer watch black and white westerns, which do not represent her.
Lisandro Alonso’s long-awaited follow-up to his acclaimed Jauja (2014) similarly stars Viggo Mortensen as a weathered cowboy in a dogged pursuit that breaches time and space. Yet Eureka is a three-part epic—western, neo-realist drama, then wilding jungle myth—that uses the genre of each part, its forms, its tropes, to explore indigenous power relations amidst colonisation. In the end Viggo is scatted to the airways, the stars, and the birds.
Unrated 15+ and with thanks to Le Pacte
Additional Readings (for those who have the time and curiosity):
Our two favourite pieces on Eureka are critical interviews in Cinema Scope (with Dennis Lim) and Film Comment (with Jordan Crock) rather than reviews. Lim’s piece opens with a Cannes specific lament which can be skipped past unless you like reading complaints about the director of Cannes, Thierry Frémaux. (Which we do.)
p.s. we really recommend a watch of the trailer to Eureka above. It gets at scope more than any accumulated word or individual picture can.
A quick aside:
With films from Ernie Gehr (1974), Nicolas Roeg (1983, trailer), Shinji Aoyama (2000), and now Lisandro Alonso, Eureka has an incredibly high strike ratio as a film title.
Upcoming Screenings:
12 September: Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka
10 October: Sean Price William’s The Sweet East
24 October: Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius & Pictures of Ghosts
7 November: Kelly Reichhardt’s Showing Up
21 November: Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bacurau (above)
5 December: Michael Mann’s Black Hat
12 December: Greg Mottola’s Confess, Fletch
We’re kinda delighted announce our upcoming screenings for the rest of the year. Some marquee Cannes titles, the conclusion of our Filho retrospective, an Australian theatrical premiere of one of the great filmmakers, and a summer Christmas appropriate title.
Due to school holidays, there will be no screening on the 26th of September.
Carlo Chatrian has been ousted from Berlinale to the dismay of filmmakers, critics and observant audiences. Chatrian has widely been regarded as the key festival artistic director, turning Locarno into a festival of discoveries and a focus point for boundary shifting cinema, before being recruited to assist the historically important but long struggling Berlinale. Despite the pandemic, his short tenure there has seen a remarkable turnaround that married the core strengths of Berlinale and its connections with the European Film Market and German cinema, with Chatrian’s sense of purpose.
The reasons why are surmisable. His work privileges film as art, he’s not German, but mostly because institutions have a profound desire to be dull. There is an open letter requesting his reinstatement, signed by hundreds of filmmakers including Martin Scorsese, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-liang, and other luminaries. However it’s hard to imagine any successful resolution to this without the departure of the board, and boards are rarely known for determining when to depart.
Along with the slow decline of Sundance and the implosion of International Film Festival Rotterdam last year, it means the beginning of the festival year will continue to be weak, while Cannes and Venice grow stronger.
Thank you. We look forward to catching you on Tuesday for our screening of Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka (pictured above), a three-part mythic epic that plays with genre in its exploration of power relations and colonisation. Then in October we’ll catch you for the impish and chaotic The Sweet East.