With today's announcement of the world premiere of the film La danza de la realidad / The Dance of Reality at Cannes' Directors' Fortnight section, legendary 84-year-old Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky (pictured) returns to filmmaking after a 23-year hiatus.
A playwright, actor, author, musician, comics writer, and spiritual guru, in addition to filmmaker, Jodorowsky gained international fame with his sophomore film, the acid western El Topo (1970) which he made in Mexico.
The film became the first midnight cult film in the United States (it still plays once in a while in midnight shows at the IFC Center in New York City). His follow up production, the Mexican-American co-production La montaña sagrada / The Holy Mountain (1973), a surrealist exploration of western esotericism, was also equally successful.
After an attempt to bring Frank Herbert's novel Dune to the big screen, Jodorowsky made three more films: the French drama Tusk (1980), the surrealist Mexican-Italian horror Santa Sangre (1989, pictured right), and the British production The Rainbow Thief starring Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif (1990).
For many years, there was a lot of speculation of Jodorowsky's return to cinema -there were rumors of a sequel to El Topo (Los Hijos del Topo), allegedly to be starred by American rock musician Marilyn Manson, but none of those projects materialized.
2013 marks the much-anticipated comeback of the Chilean cult filmmaker to the big screen with La danza de la realidad / The Dance of Reality. Based on his autobiography of the same name, Jodorowsky returns to his childhood town of Tocopilla in Chile. In addition to the world premiere of his newest film, Directors' Fortnight will also screen the documentary film Jodorowsky’s Dune by Franck Pavich which chronicles the failed attempt by the Chilean director to shoot Herbert's novel.
