Our ultimate post-Closing Night extravagance is a special one-off NZ screening of surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky’s gloriously entertaining and frequently funny new film. “Has cult potential in every baroque, eye-popping frame.” — Screendaily
The extinct volcano of underground cinema has burst into life once again – with a bizarre, chaotic and startling film.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2013
The Dance of Reality 2013
La danza de la realidad
Our ultimate post-Closing Night extravagance is a special one-off New Zealand screening of cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s stunning return to the screen for the first time in over 20 years. Gloriously entertaining and frequently funny, Jodorowsky’s Dance takes us on a surreal journey back to his childhood and his tumultuous relationship with his fiercely idealistic, Stalin-admiring father.
“As purely personal a film as Jodorowsky has ever made, Dance of Reality features no shortage of the bizarro imagery and willful atonalities that have long been his stock-in-trade, but it all seems to stem from a more sincere, coherent place this time than in the flamboyant head movies (El Topo, The Holy
Mountain) that made him a star of the 1970s midnight movie scene…
This carnivalesque memory film (with particular echoes of Fellini’s 8½ and Amarcord) transports us to the director’s childhood hometown of Tocopilla, on Chile’s northern coast, where we first meet young Alejandro (Jeremias Herskovits), along with his father, Jaime (very well played by Jodorwosky’s real-life son Brontis), and mother, Sara (Pamela Flores), whose enormous bosom could serve as a storm shelter and who sings all her dialogue in a trilling soprano.” — Scott Foundas, Variety
“Everything you wanted to know about Alejandro Jodorowsky but never imagined asking can be found in The Dance Of Reality, a joyously idiosyncratic exercise in imagined autobiography… A surprisingly witty, accessible magical mystery tour through his past that has cult potential in every baroque, eye-popping frame.” — Allan Hunter, Screendaily