Alonso's 'Double Freedom' Returns to Roots at Cannes
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- "Double Freedom" premieres at Cannes' Directors' Fortnight as a direct sequel to Lisandro Alonso's 2001 debut "Freedom," reprising nonprofessional actor Misael Saavedra, still chopping wood and smoking cigs in his Pampas shack more than 20 years later.
- DP Cobi Migliori, who shot "Freedom" and "Los Muertos" (2004), returns to give the film a fuzzy DIY visual quality — a deliberate strip-down after the scale of 2014's "Jauja" and 2023's Viggo Mortensen-led "Eureka."
- The 100-minute film covers about two-and-a-half days in Misael's life, pivoting when he retrieves his adult sister Catalina from a near-vacant asylum for the mentally impaired that is being shut down.
- Catalina Saavedra, a professional Chilean actress known for "The Maid" and "Rotting in the Sun" (no relation to the protagonist), plays the sister with an unspecified mental disability; the review flags her fidgety-hands, shifty-eyed performance as "arguably inappropriate."
- The film lands two years into Argentina's far-right government, whose austerity measures have suspended public subsidies and threaten INCAA, the state's TV and film body — making the asylum-closure subplot read as explicit social commentary.
- A post-credits sequence gives Misael his "last laugh," calling back to a rumored 2001 Cannes cut where Alonso was forced to drop a shot of the character chuckling at the camera; Alonso, a Cannes regular, has still never screened in the festival's Competition.
Why it matters: For Alonso, a Cannes fixture who has never cracked Competition, the choice to return to Directors' Fortnight with a stripped-down 100-minute two-hander reaffirms his commitment to a deliberately uncommercial form. For Argentine cinema, a quiet observational film arriving as INCAA faces existential threat from a far-right austerity government turns personal minimalism into inadvertent political testimony — and the asylum-closure subplot, with the state literally abandoning vulnerable people, lands harder because it mirrors INCAA's own precarious standing.
