Eureka (2024, Viggo Mortensen) (REVIEW) | Projector Shorts | An Indigenous anthology across time and space
Film Brain reviews this experimental anthology film focusing on Indigenous experiences across space, from the Western to the Amazon rainforest, but with too much time for thought about it's shortcomings than ideas.
Transcript
00:00 An anthology of indigenous narratives, Eureka is a very challenging film to talk about,
00:04 let alone 60 seconds, but let's try it anyway.
00:06 The film begins as a black and white western pastiche featuring Viggo Mortensen,
00:10 it then moves on to a cop and her niece living on the Pine Ridge Reservation,
00:14 before finally a tribe in the Amazon rainforest in the 1970s,
00:18 all linked by recurring ideas and actors across space, because time is a construct of man.
00:24 Although you might not feel quite the same way after watching two and a half hours of Eureka,
00:28 which is definitely slow cinema with a capital S that evokes the likes of something like Uncle
00:32 Boonmee who can recall his past lives, trying to have a poetic and meditative tone that invites
00:38 the audience to ruminate on its themes of displacement, cultural identity and violence.
00:42 For me it felt like three incomplete movies for the price of one, with the Pine Ridge Reservation
00:46 section being by far the most fully formed, and I wish that was just the movie, I could have easily
00:52 lost the other two sections. Unfortunately I felt Eureka more tested my patience than ultimately,
00:58 rewarded it.