Lisan­dro Alon­so and Rick Alver­son are team­ing up for an Ama­zon­ian epic

Sim­pati­co spir­its, Rick Alver­son and Lisan­dro Alon­so. The for­mer makes movies about the rot­ting soul of Amer­i­ca, sit­u­at­ed in increas­ing­ly obscure cor­ners of the nation­al cul­ture and his­to­ry; the lat­ter makes movies about the dete­ri­o­rat­ing her­itage of Argenti­na, plumb­ing increas­ing­ly obscure cor­ners of the cin­e­mat­ic form.

Two great inde­pen­dent film­mak­ers, and now they’re going to go great togeth­er, as report­ed by Screen Dai­ly. They will share direc­tor cred­it on The God Beside My Bed, a new project that will bring them into the jun­gles of Brazil for an exis­ten­tial epic with­in the Amazon.

The Film Stage fur­ther offers a lucid quote from Alver­son, who has described the film as ​“about an Amer­i­can cul­tur­al irrel­e­vance that Amer­i­cans will be inca­pable of see­ing, lost in their roman­tic hall of mir­rors.” Sounds like he’s pick­ing up right where his last film The Moun­tain left off, con­tin­u­ing his vivi­sec­tion of the ​“Amer­i­can dream” as a set of appeal­ing, ego­cen­tric lies.

He’s men­tioned his admi­ra­tion for Alon­so in the past, with The Film Stage cit­ing a 2015 inter­view with The Sev­enth Row in which Alver­son explains that for his Argen­tine coun­ter­part, ​“it’s all about con­tention with time – the tem­po­ral, and your rela­tion­ship to the thing – and how the audi­ence changes.” The pair share a film­mak­ing phi­los­o­phy of resist­ing con­ven­tion and flirt­ing with the avant-garde, start­ing with the squared frames they use to set their work apart from the glut of moviedom.

It sounds like this will be Alverson’s next film, but Alon­so already has Eure­ka, which reunites him with Jau­ja star Vig­go Mortensen, in the can. A 2022 fes­ti­val release would be the smart bet – an eter­ni­ty away, but for these film­mak­ers’ small yet ded­i­cat­ed base of admir­ers, more than worth the wait.