Screened as part of NZIFF 2016

Endless Poetry 2016

Poesía sin fin

Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky Vision

A glorious feast for the senses, the latest film from Chilean octogenarian and life-long maverick Alejandro Jodorowsky revisits his coming of age as an aspiring young poet in the bohemian Santiago of the 40s and 50s.

Chile / France / Japan In Spanish with English subtitles
128 minutes DCP

Director/Screenplay

Producers

Alejandro Jodorowsky
,
Moises Cosio
,
Abbas Nakhasteh
,
Asai Takashi

Photography

Christopher Doyle

Editor

Maryline Monthieux

Production designers

Patricio Aguilar
,
Denise Lira-Ratinoff

Costume designer

Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky

Music

Adan Jodorowsky

With

Adan Jodorowsky (Alejandro)
,
Pamela Flores (Sara/Stella Diaz Varín)
,
Brontis Jodorowsky (Jaime)
,
Leandro Taub (Enrique Lihn)
,
Jeremias Herskovits (young Alejandro)
,
Alejandro Jodorowsky (old Alejandro)
,
Julia Avedano (Pequenita)
,
Bastian Bodenhofer (Ibanez)
,
Carolyn Carson (Maria Lefevre)
,
Adonis (Andres Racz)

Festivals

Cannes (Directors’ Fortnight) 2016

A young man dives into the artistic life of 40s Santiago and pursues a dream of becoming a poet, in this carnivalesque memoir from the perennially youthful great-grandfather of cult cinema, 87-year-old Alejandro (El Topo) Jodorowsky.

Endless Poetry… is a work of transporting charm and feeling. It’s the most accessible movie the director has ever made, and it may also be the best. Jodorowsky is on record as saying that his favorite filmmaker is Federico Fellini, and indeed, the ghost of Fellini hovers over Endless Poetry in more ways than one can count. The movie has dwarves. It has clowns. It has temptresses with pendulous breasts. But more than that, it has an ingratiatingly wide-eyed and adventurous autobiographical hero, Alejandro Jodorowsky (played by the filmmaker’s youngest son, Adan Jodorowsky), who meshes with the bohemian enclave of Santiago in the 40s and 50s and wanders through this nightworld of sex and art and passion and destruction with a fervour of discovery…

Make no mistake: Endless Poetry is still very much a Jodorowsky film, dotted with his trademark phantasmagorical conceits, which are like candified bursts of comic-book magic realism. Yet more than any previous Jodorowsky opus, it’s also a work of disciplined and touching emotional resonance.” — Owen Glieberman, Variety

“For a visionary whose cult films have always so giddily collapsed fantasy into reality, this conjuring of his own story through his family, all together, in the cinema – it is something special and enchanting.” — Daniel Kasman, Mubi