Jauja

Director: Lisandro Alonso

2014 / 109min / DCP

Alonso’s austere, mesmeric experimental Western, winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, stars Viggo Mortensen as Captain Gunnar Dinesen, a Dane freshly arrived in a remote corner of 1880s Patagonia with his 15-year-old daughter to take an engineering job with the Argentine army, compelled to strike off on a solitary quest into the country’s unsettled wilds when the girl elopes with a young soldier. Showing the inspiration of John Ford’s The Searchers before taking a blind leap, in its astonishing final act, into a great unknown wholly foreign to Ford’s classicism, Jauja is both steeped in the history of the Western and liberated from the dry rot of homage.