The Dance of Reality

Veteran Chilean-French film director Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo, The Holy Mountain) puts his autobiography on film, focusing on his childhood in Chile in particular. Now in his mid-80s, this is Jodorowsky’s first feature film in over two decades. Says The Guardian: "The entire story is swathed in surreal mythology, dream logic and instant day-glo legend, resembling Fellini, Tod Browning, Emir Kusturica...

"You can't be sure how to extract conventional autobiography from this. Despite the title, there is more "dance" than "reality" - and that is the point. Or part of the point. For the first time, Jodorowsky is coming close to telling us how personal evasiveness has governed his film-making style; his flights of fancy are flights of pain, flights from childhood and flights from reality. And now he is using his transformative style to come to terms with and change the past and to confer on his father some of the heroism that he never attained in real life."

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