Photo: Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky
The recipient of the Imagine Career Achievement Award 2014 is Chilean director and actor Alejandro Jodorowsky. The award will be presented to him on April 9th, the festival’s opening night. His film La danza de la realisad will have its Dutch premiere at Imagine.
Alejandro Jodorowsky was born in Chile in 1929, as the son of Jewish-Ukrainian immigrants. He started writing poetry at a young age and joined the circus as a clown. In 1947 he started his own theatre group: the Teatro Mimico and when he moved to France he studied with mime player Marcel Marceau.
From 1960 on, he alternated between living in Paris and in Mexico, where he co-founded the anarchist Panic movement. In 1967 he made his first feature film in Mexico, Fando y Lis, which caused a scandal and was banned.
His second film, the acid western El Topo, sold out New York night screenings for six months. John Lennon, an admirer, contributed 1 million dollar to the sequel, The Holy Mountain. After a conflict with his producer, the two films wouldn’t be available again for over thirty years, until a re-release on DVD in 2007. In 1974 he started preparing to adapt Frank Herbert’s Dune, but he couldn’t get the budget together. Last year, Frank Pavich made the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune about that period.
Meanwhile, Jodorowsky made Santa Sangre in 1989, and last year he released the highly autobiographical La danze de la realidad, in which he returns to his childhood in the Chilean coastal town of Tocopilla.
Recurring themes in Jodorowsky’s films are the quests for enlightenment, rebirth and transformation, coupled with extreme and explicit violence. His films don’t really cohere to a strict logic, but are associative narratives full of symbolism, aiming to provoke a subconscious reaction from his viewers.
Besides his film work, Jodorowsky directed over 100 stage plays and wrote more than 80 comics and 40 books, including essays, poetry, memoirs and novels. Jodorowsky is also a Tarot reader and a spiritual guru. He developed psychomagic, a form of therapy in which deep-seated traumas are processed with the aid of symbolic acts, which has a large following in Europe and Latin America.
Jodorowsky is currently working on a sequel to El Topo. This film, which will be titled Able Cain, is scheduled to start production later this year.
Filmography
1957 La cravate
1968 Fando y Lis
1970 El Topo
1973 The HolyMountain
1978 Tusk*
1989 Santa Sangre
1990 The RainbowThief*
2013 La danza de la realidad
*Jodorowsky has distanced himself from these films
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Programme during Imagine
Thursday, April 10
12.00, EYE 2 Masterclass with Alejandro Jodorowsky
17.00, EYE 1 Jodorowsky’s Dune
18.55, EYE 1 La danza de la realidad + Q&A
Tuesday, April 15
19.00, EYE 2 La danza de la realidad
Wednesday, April 16
19.25 EYE 1 Jodorowsky’s Dune
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Special guests Imagine Film Festival 2014
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Pete Schuermann - director of The Creep Behind the Camera
Nancy Theken – executive producer of The Creep Behind the Camera
Josh Philips – leading actor in The Creep Behind the Camera
Rhonda Roberts –supporting actress in The Creep Behind the Camera
Dave Wruck – editor of The Creep Behind the Camera
Till Kleinert – director of Der Samurai
Nikolas List - director of Tombville
Frank Pavich - Jodorowsky's Dune
Stephanie Leonidas – actress in Defiance
Kevin Grazier - science advisor for, amongst others, Gravity, and author of the book The Science of Dune. Lecture for the Fantastic Science theme programme
David Kirby – author of the book Lab Coats in Hollywood about the influence of science on film. Lecture for the Fantastic Science theme programme
John Piedot - creative director of British company Editpool. Masterclass film trailers
Miguel Ángel Font Bisier - director of Sinnside
Ate de Jong, Chris W. Mitchell and Djie Han Thung will be in Amsterdam during the entire festival, and be present during their respective screenings with introductions and Q&A’s.
Imagine Film Festival
9 - 18 April 2014 - EYE Amsterdam
www.imaginefilmfestival.nl
Chatelin Bruno 
