JAUJA

Patagonia, 1882, the time of the so-called Conquest of the Desert, by which the Argentine army seized the land of the indigenous population. The Danish captain Gunnar Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen) has joined the troops as an engineer and has brought along his fifteen-year-old daughter Ingeborg. She falls in love with a young soldier, and one night the two of them have vanished. Dinesen rides after them, into enemy territory, through a landscape of scrub, rock and grass, in which he finds his daughter less with every day than he loses himself. Lisandro Alonso’s “Jauja” (Argentina, 2014) bears the name of a legendary land of plenty that everyone has sought and no one has reached.

Alonso shoots in an almost square format with rounded corners, which gives the images the look of old photographs, and lets the narrative tip into something dreamlike towards the end. Viggo Mortensen co-produced the film and contributed the music. It premiered in the Un Certain Regard section in Cannes in 2014, where “Jauja” won the FIPRESCI Prize. The film was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2014.

Shown at the 2014 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.

All films 2014 · Film Archive