Cannes Review: Double Freedom Is an Entrancing Homecoming of Sorts for Lisandro Alonso

One of the most pernicious tendencies in the way we talk about cinema is to reduce films to quantifiable objects—things that can be assessed in terms of how much or little goes on in them. It’s the kind of approach that says a lot less about the movies themselves than our dispiritingly myopic readiness to conflate their worth with the thickness of their plot. And it’s hardly the right means to account for those that, immune to the content-first dogmas foisted upon so much of the stuff that passes on screens big and small nowadays, testify that a film can be a lot more than the sum of its beats. Cue La Libertad (Freedom). In 2001, Lisandro Alonso broke onto the international arthouse scene with a feature debut of almost disarming and beguiling simplicity; self-produced with family money and shot with friends, it followed a day in the life of a woodcutter from Argentina’s rural Pampas. Misael Saavedra played himself, and Alonso chronicled his routine: chopping caldén trees, munching on armadillo meat, and napping in a shack of corrugated iron sheets in the middle of the forest. Argentina was then at a socioeconomic nadir, wrestling with a great depression that fueled mass unemployment and civil unrest across the country, and twenty-something Misael stood for a generation of young people who seemed to have lost all faith in the future. But that was to foist a political reading upon a film that felt matter-of-fact in its presentation: here was a man who went about his business, and Alonso invited you to just watch him be. 

25 years later, the director returns to the subject with Double Freedom, following Misael, now in his fifties, as he does much of the same. Little has changed in a milieu that looks frozen in time: the man’s hut is still intact, his Dogo Argentino patrolling the place, and the days spent shedding trees into poles sold to neighbors erecting fences in the vicinity. Yet Double Freedom significantly expands the scope of its predecessor. A late-night opening shot of Misael feasting on a grilled armadillo modeled exactly after the protracted sequence that kicked off Freedom might trick you into thinking Alonso will revisit his first feature verbatim. But a twist arrives early on: the man is told his sister Micaela was seen roaming the nearby village on her own in the dead of night. She’s spent the last 15 years locked in a mental asylum; when Misael shows up to investigate, he’s told that budget cuts will force the place to shut down—he’ll have to look after her himself. 

If you’ve seen Freedom, you might remember Misael mentioning Micaela on a phone call with a friend halfway through, but that Alonso enlists Chilean actress Catalina Saavedra for the role indicates Double Freedom is operating in a starkly different mode. Where Freedom’s dedramatized, observational approach nudged the whole thing toward documentary terrain, this one is closer to a hybrid. What begins as another uninflected look at Misael’s routine, almost Bazinian in its realism, steadily morphs into a film that’s pitched along the boundary between fact and fiction. Misael takes in his sister, who requires several pills each day to treat her condition, and learns how to share his life with hers. But Double Freedom still manages to weave into her fictitious storyline some contemplative moments, and that syncretic nature, in retrospect, is its most entrancing aspect. 

Misael, who’s had a few roles in Alonso’s projects since their first collaboration, is an untrained actor, and his restrained, watchful performance makes for a curious clash with Saavedra’s, who’s twitchingly alive to her fresh surroundings in a way that suggests someone taking their first steps on a brand-new planet. But this whole film is an amalgam. Like precious few directors working today, Alonso occupies a middle ground between the controllers and intuitionists, between filmmakers who operate within locked-in, predetermined schemes and others who instead like to surrender to the unexpected. One of Double Freedom’s greatest charms is the way it feels at once planned and improvised, both staged and keen to let life sneak into its frames. Like its antecedent, it straddles the secular and spiritual, both in tune with the very practical activities of the man at its center—working, eating, sleeping—and the mysteries radiating from his environment. Both were lensed by Cobi Migliora, but though the first stopped just short of invoking Malick, there are moments of poetic subjectivity here that echo The Tree of Life’s own Way of Grace. A shot of Micaela’s hands rubbing the bark of a caldén tree at magic hour elevates the journey into a mystical realm; there’s a world full of wonders for those with the eyes to see them. 

How you’ll respond to the particular beauty of Double Freedom isn’t contingent on your knowledge of its prequel—or the rest of Alonso’s body of work, for that matter. It will depend on your willingness to open up to a different kind of filmmaking, one that’s outright subversive in its preference for direct emotional communication over narrative, that’s unafraid to ask for your time in exchange for its secrets. The label “slow cinema” has been thrown at Alonso’s oeuvre since the start. And while that technically checks out—though the pace here is faster than it was in Freedom, and the takes, on average, a lot shorter—I cannot help but find that another depressingly limiting way to account for a filmmaking that’s not slow but spacious. Alonso’s long, unbroken scenes—of Misael at work, of the forest abuzz with birdsong and the thuds of his axe on the wood—are rooms that you can drift in and out of. How rare, and how thrilling, to come across a film that allows you the privilege of losing and finding yourself again in its folds. 

Double Freedom premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.