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Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s next film will be titled Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths), Deadline has learned. The news comes as the five-time Oscar winner wraps production in Mexico City.

The feature penned by Iñárritu and his longtime collaborator Nicolás Giacobone is billed as a nostalgic comedy set against an epic journey. A chronicle of uncertainties where the main character, a renowned Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker, returns to his native country to face his identity, familial relationships, and the folly of his memories, as well as the past and new reality of his country.

Daniel Jimenez Cacho and Griselda Siciliani star in the film, which marks Iñárritu’s return to his native country, 20 years after Amores Perros. Bardo comes on the heels of his Oscar winners The Revenant and Birdman, as well as his virtual installation Carne y Arena.

Oscar nominee Darius Khondji (Uncut Gems, Okja) photographed the indie produced by Iñárritu, with Oscar winner Eugenio Caballero (Roma, Pan’s Labyrinth) serving as production designer and Anna Terrazas (Roma, The Deuce) as costume designer.

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Netflix has acquired Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s next film Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, with plans to release it in both theaters and on the streamer at year’s end. The filmmaker is currently in post-production, and is expected to wrap by fall.

Shot on 65mm and boasting striking cinematography from Oscar nominee Darius Khondji, the film will get a theatrical release on a global scale later this year including in Mexico, its country of origin, as well as the U.S., Canada, UK, Italy, Spain, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Japan and Korea among many more before debuting on Netflix.

Written by González Iñárritu and Nicolás Giacobone, the film is a nostalgic comedy set against an epic personal journey. It chronicles the story of a renowned Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker who returns home and works through an existential crisis as he grapples with his identity, familial relationships, the folly of his memories as well as the past of his country. He seeks answers in his past to reconcile who he is in the present.

“Alejandro is one of the greatest modern filmmakers and one of the leading visionaries in our industry,” said Netflix Head of Global Film Scott Stuber. “Bardo is a cinematic experience that has inspired us to create a release strategy designed for the film to penetrate culture in the biggest and widest way. We will give film lovers everywhere the opportunity to experience the film through a global theatrical release and the film’s worldwide release on Netflix. Having known Alejandro for a long time, I am personally very excited to finally be able to work alongside him and to bring his film to a global audience.”

The film marks González Iñárritu’s first feature film since winning the Oscar for directing The Revenant, which also had Leonardo DiCaprio take home his first Oscar for Best Actor.

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BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of TruthsIn theaters: BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths will open theatrically everywhere in Mexico on October 27th, followed by a limited theatrical release in the US, Spain and Argentina on November 4th, before rolling out in a global expansion on November 18th. The film will debut on Netflix December 16th.
Genre: Drama
Logline: Five-time Academy Award–winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu brings us BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths. BARDO is an epic, visually stunning and immersive experience set against the intimate and moving journey of Silverio, a renowned Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker living in Los Angeles, who, after being named the recipient of a prestigious international award, is compelled to return to his native country, unaware that this simple trip will push him to an existential limit. The folly of his memories and fears have decided to pierce through the present, filling his everyday life with a sense of bewilderment and wonder.
With both emotion and abundant laughter, Silverio grapples with universal yet intimate questions about identity, success, mortality, the history of Mexico and the deeply emotional familial bonds he shares with his wife and children. Indeed, what it means to be human in these very peculiar times.
Cast: Daniel Giménez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani, Ximena Lamadrid and Iker Solano
Director: Alejandro G. Iñarritu

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Like its mouthful of a title, Alejandro G. Iñarritu’s “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths” has a lot going on. The movie, which follows a successful journalist and filmmaker (Daniel Giménez Cacho) who returns to his native Mexico City after many years in the U.S., unfurls many bold and surrealist twists as it moves along. Loaded with dream sequences and metaphors for Mexico’s complicated history, the essence of “Bardo” is hard to distill into a single description — which made the process of assembling the trailer into a daunting task.

“The film is always navigating through these ridiculous things that happen and deep things that co-exist with them,” Iñarritu told IndieWire over Zoom this week. “I thought the trailer should express that.” (Watch it, exclusively on IndieWire, at the end of this article.)

He collaborated with trailer editor extraordinaire Mark Woollen (whose other recent credits include “TÁR” and “White Noise”) to assemble a stunning immersion into the phantasmagoric nature of the movie set to The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus.” Iñarritu secured the song with the help of Sean Lennon, a fan of the filmmaker’s work and the son of the Beatles frontman. “John Lennon deliberately wrote lyrics for that song that are impossible to be interpreted,” Iñarritu said. “Nonsense that makes sense is what this film is trying to do. Mark Woollen made it so that the lyrics made sense with the images.”

Iñarritu has been wrestling with his vision a lot in recent weeks. In addition to working on the trailer, the filmmaker reopened the edit on his movie after watching it with audiences in Venice and Telluride, shrinking and rearranging certain scenes while adding a new one in.

The latest cut, which screens for the first time at the San Sebastián Film Festival this week, runs a full 22 minutes shorter, bringing the total running time to two hours and 32 minutes without credits.

Iñarritu said that since deadlines prevented him from holding friends and family screenings before his initial festival run, it was only during that period that he was able to process the movie with an audience. “The first time I saw my film was with 2,000 people in Venice,” he said. “That was a nice opportunity to see it and learn about things that could benefit from being tied up a bit, add one scene that never arrived on time, and move the order of one or two things. Little by little, I tightened it, and I am very excited about it.” That process was still ongoing. “Honestly, I will keep doing this until it’s released to get the best film while I can,” he said. “You never finish a film. The deadlines just ask you to deliver it.”

This is nothing new for the director, who said he tinkered with the edits of “21 Grams” and “Babel” after their respective festival premieres. “If I could, I would keep editing the whole year,” he said. “I would love to keep working with this film all my life.”

At Telluride, Iñarritu said he was avoiding early reviews of “Bardo,” which were mixed. This week, he confirmed that nothing has changed on that front. “I want to reaffirm that I have not read one single review for my healthy mental state,” he said. “There is nobody better than me who knows all the dots that connect and how they could connect better.”

The additional scene added into the movie revolves around a conversation that the protagonist has with his driver as they ride into Mexico City. “It’s a very endearing little scene,” Iñarritu said, but declined to elaborate on other tweaks. “That’s the magic trick that nobody will really know. Most importantly, I think it got faster. I did some restructuring with the music that made me feel more confident about it.” However, a prolonged dance floor sequence that’s a centerpiece of the movie remains the same. “Most of the film is in untouched,” Iñarritu said. “It was really about getting the internal rhythm of certain scenes right.”

Iñarritu noted that his first cut of “Bardo” ran over four hours, but insisted that length was never his biggest concern. “I’ve seen films that are 80 minutes and too long,” he said, “or three-and-a-half hours and not too long at all. There is nothing more powerful than seeing the film with audiences. That’s what helped me.”

Nevertheless, he added with a smirk, “it is shorter than ‘The Revenant.’” (Iñarritu’s Oscar-winning wilderness epic runs about four minutes longer.)

Regardless of how the latest cut differs from the earlier one, the trailer captures the essence of the movie, condensing many of its most striking visuals into an impressive collage. It also takes dialogue out of the equation. “There is something about reading subtitles in trailers that can interrupt the flow,” Iñarritu said. “We felt that images were navigating what we wanted to say emotionally.”

From an opening scene in which the character imagines he can fly to a later one where he converses with his father’s ghost, “Bardo” ebbs and flows with a constant subjectivity. “We wanted this mural of mental states,” Iñarritu said. “Mexico is not a country, it’s a state of mind, and the film came from that — this sense of a country that does not belong to you, and you cannot return to it.”

After San Sebastián, the new cut of “Bardo” will make its way through the festival circuit, with bookings at London and AFI FEST ahead of a theatrical release from Netflix on November 18 (it begins streaming on the service December 16). Meanwhile, it remains a frontrunner for Mexico’s official Oscar submission as one of four films on the country’s shortlist. The final determination will be made at the end of the month. “Anything they decide will be great,” Iñarritu said. “There are some other great films trying to be selected as well. It’s very hard to know the outcome.”

He was heartened by early responses to “Bardo” in his native country, where he said it was viewed as a “very Chilango film” — slang for people who live in Mexico City, where most of the story takes place. “Chilangos are getting it,” he said. “That has been very satisfying to me.” Most of all, he was gratified to find that despite the heavy subject matter, the humor came through. “People laugh a lot,” he said. “That has been the most rewarding thing for me.”

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