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.
Get more Little White Lies
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.
