Few directors today possess the fortitude of vision and resolute commitment to an ideal of formally rigorous narrative cinema of Argentine filmmaker Lisandro Alonso (b. 1975), one of the most accomplished and original artists working in contemporary Latin American cinema. Alonso’s four films – La Libertad (2001), Los Muertos (2004), Liverpool (2008) and the featurette Fantasma (2006) – have renewed the promise of the nuevo cine argentino of the 1990s by turning away from the decidedly mainstream direction subsequently taken by many of that movement’s more prominent directors and towards a mode of radically minimalist cinema that bends traditions of both documentary and narrative film. Meditative and melancholy, Alonso’s films offer lyrical variations on the theme of solitude, with each of his three features haunted by the enigma of lonely wanderers drifting with deliberate but unstated purpose through remote hinterlands – the endless pampas in La Libertad, the teeming jungle in Los Muertos, the frigid snow country of Tierra del Fuego archipelago in Liverpool. The sensorial detail evoked by the films’ desolate settings – and captured by Alonso’s exquisitely choreographed 35mm cinematography – marks a powerful contrast to their deeply interiorized protagonists, an elemental tactility of heat and cold and wind and stars that gives Alonso’s cinema the mysterious lucidity of a waking dream. Richly abstract, the films of Alonso’s tetralogy of loneliness are anchored by the weight and mystery of their remarkable non-professional actors and by the almost fable-like dimension of Alonso’s stark and mesmerizing tales.

The Harvard Film Archive is pleased and proud to welcome one of the rising stars of contemporary world cinema for his first visit to the Boston area.