THE DANCE OF REALITY

He has been absent from the big screen for over two decades. Now Alejandro Jodorowsky - filmmaker, theater director, actor, writer, musician, comic book author, psychomagician, tarologist and whatever else - presents The Dance of Reality (La Danza de la Realidad), a film that can also safely be called an exorcism. Born in 1929 in Tocopilla, Chile, to a Jewish-Ukrainian family and working in Mexico and France from the 1950s onwards, Jodorowsky's wild work is based on his autobiographical collection of texts of the same name, published in 2001. The Dance of Reality initially offers a conglomerate of impressions of Alejandro's unhappy childhood that slide into the surreal, before following in the footsteps of his intolerant dictator father Jaime and subjecting him to a painfully humiliating purification process in a wildly fabulated picaresque. According to the director, the film - in which Jodorowsky's son Bronti plays Jaime's father - has become “a piece of family healing art in the psychomagical sense”. A self-therapeutic fantasy that, in looking back on the danger, allows the saving aspects of the future to grow. An excessively symbolic and metaphorically spewing monster of a movie. Tragicomic, daring, grandiose!