This film was released on Friday 10th April 2015 and is no longer screening.

At a remote colonial outpost in 19th century Patagonia, Danish engineer Gunnar Dinesen (an exceptional Viggo Mortensen) sits with his beloved teenaged daughter Ingeborg contemplating the desolate expanse surrounding them. Intensely protective of her innocence, Dinesen shields advances made on Ingeborg by a lascivious Lieutenant but fails to discern her devotion to a bashful soldier who she elopes with one night to her father’s despair who chases off after her.

While the premise is akin to an archetypal Western like The Searchers, director Lisandro Alonso resists conventions in almost every other respect, eschewing the genre’s usual widescreen effect for a more compact framing in Academy ratio and subverting norms with ingenious shifts both in time and mood. The FIPRESCI Prize-winner at Cannes, Jauja, which is presented as ‘a mythological land of abundance and happiness’, is a deeply atmospheric film that is as mysterious and beautiful as it is affecting. (Notes by Alice Butler)

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★★★★ The Irish Times