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.
[It] heralds [Jodorowsky] as a master of a deeply personal magic-realist genre, effortlessly moving as it is psychologically and artistically rich.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2016
Endless Poetry 2016
Poesía sin fin
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