16/05/2026 - CANNES 2026: Lisandro Alonso makes a welcome return to the territory of his pathbreaking film Freedom, tracking the life of the same Las Pampas woodcutter 25 years later

Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso returns to the origins of his career – and relatedly, the wellspring of the so-called “slow cinema” movement – with Double Freedom, a belated sequel to 2001’s Freedom (which was more commonly known by its Spanish title, La Libertad). With 25 years having passed, we first find Misael (Misael Saavedra, incarnating a loose version of himself) existing just as we left him, subsisting in a spartan life of self-directed manual labour: cutting down trees, refining the wood and enjoying a sense of mild community with the traders he supplies. Yet, as we soon discover, this is a very different film to its predecessor, as Misael must deal with an emergency involving his severely mentally ill sister (eminent Chilean actress Catalina Saavedra, no relation to him). Not just referencing his prior work, Alonso incorporates lessons and aspects from all of his features to date, resulting in something characteristically haunting and powerful that has premiered in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.

Like in Albert Serra’s Liberté – a very different film, yet still by a kindred artistic spirit – Alonso beckons us to contemplate what that term really means, and to see how it can be embodied on screen. It’s a deceptively simple question; Misael’s absolute isolation in the Pampas and his self-reliance could be myopic, or utopian, as he determines the very pace of his life and holds all responsibility for his economic independence. And the concept is self-reflexive: Alonso is similarly unbound by the dictates of his own medium, free to observe Misael’s careful craftsmanship in a way that’s both strikingly plain and visually transfixing.

Later, in films like Los Muertos and Liverpool, Alonso hypnotically captured a more ambulatory sense of movement, bonding cinematic time to his characters’ real-time motion. Instead, Double Freedom progresses towards a confrontation with responsibility: Micaela is being discharged from a nearby mental asylum (and had a predilection for getting drunk and escaping temporarily), as they’re experiencing state austerity (a pointed reference to the country’s Milei era), and their next of kin must now be their in-home carers, although her antipsychotic medication will still be provided by them. So, Misael and the disorientated, yet always attentive, Micaela must learn to co-habit together, and Alonso’s film then becomes an experiment in whether their mutual senses of freedom can be compatible and, expectedly, a hard-hearted admission that they likely can’t.

Micaela seems ever-stimulated by her surroundings, particularly the birds and the texture of the tree branches she clasps, as if they held some latent spiritual meaning. By contrast, Misael’s “freedom” has also been an excuse not to care, and to be apathetic to the more complex needs of other people. The atmosphere feels somehow both prelapsarian and post-apocalyptic, with the remoteness from the life and socialisation most of us know being very palpable; the many animals we observe, the most memorable being a melancholic-seeming black lamb who’s wandered from his flock, appear far more in harmony with the flat and rock-laden environment. In the early years of the millennium, Freedom and Los Muertos felt to some like the laying down of a gauntlet of cinematic difficulty; Double Freedom could never seem as radically unfamiliar, but its eloquence, patience and worldliness are humbling to absorb, when we compare it to many contemporary auteur films.

Double Freedom is a co-production involving Chile, Argentina, Luxembourg, Germany, the UK, Uruguay and the USA, staged by Planta, Deptford Film and 4L. Further co-producers are Les Films Fauves, The Match Factory Productions, Cimarrón, Pulpa Film and Carte Blanche. Its world sales are handled by Luxbox.