The Vancouver International Film Festival presents:
Endless Poetry
Poesía sin fin, Chile/France 2016, 128min
Dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky
Friday, December 16, 2016, 8:30pm
Saturday, December 17, 2016, 9pm
Tuesday, December 20, 2016, 6pm
Thursday, December 29, 2016, 5:30pm
Vancity Theatre
Cult legend Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo), now in his late 80s, looks back on his youth and fashions this wildly inventive, criminally charming chronicle of the young poetry and sex-mad Alejandro (played by the director’s son, Adan) let loose among the bohemians of Santiago, Chile, in the 1940s and 50s. Getting out from under the yoke of his caddish father, who has no truck with Alejandro’s love of poetry, the young lad is drawn to the Café Iris, scene of many a bohemian bacchanal, where he encounters the red-haired Stella (Pamela Flores) and is instantly smitten. And so begins the journey of a young man with an endless appetite for adventures of any kind, be they sexual or poetical… Directed with Jodorowsky’s characteristic flair for the surreal and the sublime, this enchanting film is one heckuva ride.
“Felliniesque and moving… [Jodorowsky] has managed to reinvent himself in the most spectacular and unlikely way. Endless Poetry, the second in [his] proposed trio of cinematic memoirs (the first was 2013’s The Dance of Reality), 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… 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 Gleiberman, Variety
“A crowning, late career achievement.” Adrian Mack, Georgia Straight
“Alejandro Jodorowski is one of the most inspiring artists of our times… He is a prophet of creativity.” Kanye West