Film

The Dance of Reality

Name: The Dance of Reality
Genre: Drama, Fantasy
Released: 2013
Cast: Brontis Jodorowsky, Pamela Flores, Jeremias Herskovits, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Bastián Bodenhöfer

Biopic
Slow-burning

Alejandro Jodorowsky's autobiographical fever dream of his Chilean childhood, where surrealism bleeds into memory and family trauma becomes visual spectacle. Part excavation, part artistic manifesto, it's hypnotic and strange—deliberately so. For viewers willing to surrender to its logic rather than demand conventional narrative, it's extraordinary. Others will find it impenetrable or self-indulgent.

TMDb rating

3.6

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love surreal, operatic autobiography, where a childhood in a harsh desert town becomes a parade of myth, colour and theatrical gesture rather than a tidy memoir.

Skip it if you want a straightforward life story, since this drifts through symbol and staging, and its heightened, self-mythologising style can feel indulgent rather than revealing.

What it asks of you: Two hours and ten minutes of patience for a dreamlike, loosely stitched shape, swinging between stark poverty and vivid fantasy, with images doing the work that plot usually would.

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