News

Spain’s Festival de Málaga, through its industry arm Mafiz (Málaga Festival Industry Zone), heads to the Cannes Marché du Film with five works-in-progress from burgeoning Andalusian talent.

“The Malaga Festival wants to support the completion of these works and make their international distribution viable,” commented Malaga head of industry, Annabelle Aramburu.

This year, as Cannes more broadly celebrates Spain, the event curates two titles that tackle its tumultuous history and one which takes audiences on an unconventional road trip questioning the biological clock alongside narratives that dissect the minutiae of new forms of co-existing and the baffling concept of destiny.

The second edition of Málaga Goes to Cannes takes place on Monday May 22.

“Alone In The Night,” (Guillermo Rojas)

A wry take on the eve of Feb. 23, 1981 when an attempted coup in Spain threatened its young democracy, profoundly changing the lives of the protagonists, an ensemble cast that includes...

Externo begins with a series of disclaimers written in bold red lettering as the screen glides through a kaleidoscope of monochrome imagery:

‘This film is based on a true story… The reality that you will see in this film is not real… The rulers don’t behave as we show in this film… So, please be kind and don’t interpret this story as reality’.

Is this an earnest plea, sardonic irony or a pointed rebuttal of conspiracy extremists? It might be all three. In any case, it becomes obvious that the filmmakers have an appropriately skeptical view of the world and an awareness of the monied interests that shape it.

Our focaliser is Joseph (Leandro Taub), a radical businessman who plans to conquer the world with $2000 dollars and a smart phone. Living off-grid in a derelict warehouse, Joseph liaises with a network of industries, plotting ways in which to...

Based on a ’70s manga by Japanese master Osamu Tezuka, a bored writer’s affair with his beguiling young muse gets the live-action treatment in “Tezuka’s Barbara.” Primarily concerned with the story’s excursions into erotic surrealism and the occult while playing down its social and political themes, this handsomely packaged item isn’t deep or meaningful but does present a visually arresting account of middle-aged male ennui colliding with uninhibited and irresistible female energy. Sure to be welcomed by Tezuka’s large fan base in Japan, “Barbara” has enjoyed a lengthy festival run since bowing in competition at the Tokyo Film Festival.

One of several adults-only tales by the legendary creator of children’s classics “Astro Boy” and “Kimba the White Lion,” “Barbara” first appeared in Big Comic magazine in 1973 and was long considered unfilmable. It has finally been adapted by Tezuka’s eldest son, Macoto Tezka, a highly...

A producer on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “Endless Poetry” is fighting to reclaim a $200,000 loan repayment as part of an ongoing legal dispute with the cult filmmaker’s Satori Films banner.

A Paris tribunal has directed Satori Films to pay Amir Abbas Nokhasteh, an executive producer on “Endless Poetry,” almost $200,000 in repayment of a loan from the producer that was used to make the 2016 film.

A March 2020 court order from the Judicial Tribunal of Paris, seen by Variety, required Satori Films to pay a provisional sum of $193,484.01 as repayment of a $200,000 loan on the film, plus $3,563 in legal costs. However, Satori Films, of which Jodorowsky owns 94%, filed for voluntary liquidation on July 23, according to filings on France’s Infogreffe registry, seen by Variety.

“I’m not looking for sympathy at all. It is more about shedding a light on something that is happening,” Nokhasteh tells Variety.

The origins of the dispute stretch back to 2015 when Jodorowsky,...

Part infomercial, part surrealist performance art, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s newest documentary Psychomagic, a Healing Art is a messy exploration of the filmmaker’s own psycho-analytic technique, one which takes individual trauma and recontextualizes it within the space of performance art. Well, in truth, that’s kind of what Jodorowsky is pitching. Much like his previous filmography, Jodorowsky’s method, and the subsequent film based on this ideology, exists between the profound and the vapid, depending on one’s taste. Perhaps intended for the already converted, and the Jodorowsky completists (if such a sub-category exists), Psychomagic is a dense, ridiculous, sublime, problematic exploration of what Jodorowsky pitches as the antithesis of Freudian psychoanalysis.

The filmmaker, as he is wont to do, casts himself as a mythic shaman, explaining directly to the camera in the opening frames what “psychomagic” exactly is. Unlike Freudian analysis, psychomagic doesn’t use words to work through personal trauma.

With the psychedelic zaniness of “El Topo” and “The Holy Mountain,” Chilean-born director Alejandro Jodorowsky invented the concept of the midnight movie, but even the filmmaker’s most outrageous gambles weren’t weird-for-weirdness’ sake. His filmmaking matches its trippier elements with sensitive, even sensual, qualities, so it’s unsurprising that a director keen on burrowing inside his audience’s mind also fancies himself a therapist.

“Psychomagic, A Healing Art” is a wandering non-fiction collage of the shamanic service Jodorowsky has offered tortured souls for decades and allows the 91-year-old to make the case for his strange services. The result is , a dreamlike chronicle of human suffering for which Jodorowsky offers a wild solution on par with his craziest filmmaking conceits.

Jodorowsky has appeared in his own stories before, guiding audiences through autobiographical dramas “The Dance of Reality” and “Endless Poetry,” but in “Psychomagic” he’s less storyteller, more interdimensional reality show host.

Sky-diving, live burial, and body paint are just a few of the wild images seen in the first trailer for “Psychomagic, a Healing Art,” the new film from Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky. IndieWire shares the trailer exclusively below, ahead of the film’s VOD release on August 7 via Alamo on Demand, Alamo Drafthouse’s new digital platform.

The movie’s distributor Abkco Films will drop a deluxe box set August 21 featuring 4K restorations of Jodorowsky classics such as “El Topo,” “Fando y Lis,” and “The Holy Mountain” supervised by the director using the original 35mm elements, as well as “Psychomagic, A Healing Art.” Here’s a synopsis:

“Psychomagic, A Healing Art” is an intimate exploration of the visionary director’s theory of trauma therapy. Jodorowsky’s unique concept of healing uses performance art as a vehicle to counter deep, debilitating psychic suffering with literal “acts of confrontation” in real world applications.

Sky-diving, live burial, and body paint are just a few of the wild images seen in the first trailer for “Psychomagic, a Healing Art,” the new film from Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky. IndieWire shares the trailer exclusively below, ahead of the film’s VOD release on August 7 via Alamo on Demand, Alamo Drafthouse’s new digital platform.

The movie’s distributor Abkco Films will drop a deluxe box set August 21 featuring 4K restorations of Jodorowsky classics such as “El Topo,” “Fando y Lis,” and “The Holy Mountain” supervised by the director using the original 35mm elements, as well as “Psychomagic, A Healing Art.” Here’s a synopsis:

“Psychomagic, A Healing Art” is an intimate exploration of the visionary director’s theory of trauma therapy. Jodorowsky’s unique concept of healing uses performance art as a vehicle to counter deep, debilitating psychic suffering with literal “acts of confrontation” in real world applications.

Cult Chilean-French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s new film, a documentary about trauma therapy titled “Psychomagic, A Healing Art,” is set to debut from Abkco Films via Alamo On Demand this summer. Alamo Drafthouse’s VOD platform will premiere the film August 7, preceded by a five-film retrospective of the “Holy Mountain” director’s best work beginning August 1. The five films included in the lineup are “Fando y Lis,” “El Topo,” “The Holy Mountain,” “The Dance of Reality,” and “Endless Poetry.” Additionally, the platform will host a virtual master class with Jodorowsky August 8.

Abkco Films will also drop a deluxe box set August 21 featuring 4K restorations of Jodorowsky classics, supervised by the director using the original 35mm elements, as well as “Psychomagic, A Healing Art.” Here’s a synopsis:

“‘Psychomagic, A Healing Art’ is an intimate exploration of the visionary director’s theory of trauma therapy. Jodorowsky’s unique concept of healing...

Chilean master cult filmmaker, and father of the “midnight movie,” Alejandro Jodorowsky’s latest film Psychomagic, A Healing Art will premiere in the U.S. and Canada on August 7 through an exclusive arrangement with Alamo Drafthouse‘s new VOD platform, Alamo On Demand.

Jodorowsky made two surreal classics in films of the 1970s, the spiritual western epic El Topo (1970), and The Holy Mountain (1973), which was partly funded by John Lennon. The Holy Mountain sparked controversy at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival due to its sacrilegious imagery. It also established Jodorowsky as an auteur of Surrealist Cinema. The documentary-form avant-garde movie Psychomagic, A Healing Art is being presented by Abkco Films. The ex-Beatle introduced Jodorowsky’s work to his then-manager Allen Klein, whose Abkco Music & Records houses catalogues from Sam Cooke, The Rolling Stones, Bobby Womack, The Kinks, and Marianne Faithfull. Klein had an interest in film, and would go on to produce Blindman,...

In today’s film news roundup, a directors’s cut of “Everest” has been scheduled for release, “John Lewis: Good Trouble” has been set for international sales, RightsTrade hires Bill Lischak, Gerard Butler’s “Greenland” is scheduled and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s latest film gets a release.

Releases

MacGillivray Freeman Films has set a February release for a special director’s cut edition of the 1998 giant-screen documentary “Everest.”

The new version will be released in conjunction with the 25th anniversary of the historic 1996 storm on the world’s highest mountain. The original film is the highest-grossing giant-screen documentary of all time, earning more than $152 million in worldwide ticket sales.

Narrated by Liam Neeson, “Everest” centers on the team of four climbers who ascended Mount Everest just days after fellow

mountaineers and friends died in the 1996 disaster. Produced and directed by Greg MacGillivray, with co-directors Stephen Judson and David Breashears, the director...

New mini-theatre complex will mark Uplink’s third arthouse cinema in Japan.

Japanese specialist distributor-exhibitor Uplink Co is gearing up to open a four-screen cinema in the city of Kyoto, marking its third arthouse cinema opening in Japan.

Scheduled to open on April 16, the cinema will show arthouse films from around the world, as well as Japanese films with English subtitles for English-speaking residents and tourists in Kyoto. Each screening room will have a different design concept, colours and style.

The cinema will be located in the Shinpukan cultural and shopping complex, a redevelopment based on a historic building that...

The veteran director stars as a black-clad horseman on a bizarre desert quest with worrying Mansonesque overtones in his rereleased head trip of 1970

Now 90 and still a vigorously engaged public figure, the midnight-movie magus, comic-book artist and tarot enthusiast Alejandro Jodorowsky has become the touchstone for a certain kind of untamed cinema, the last survivor-practitioner of underground freaky radicalism, standing up to corporate blandness with his countercultural film-making. A remarkable late-flowering of creativity recently brought us his highly personal films The Dance of Reality (2013) and Endless Poetry (2016). Now we can see his 1970 breakthrough, El Topo (The Mole), which is on rerelease.

Influenced by Sergio Leone, Tod Browning, Luis Buñuel and (worryingly) Charles Manson, it’s a bizarre head-trip festival of occult psychedelia, heatstroke visuals, Age-of-Aquarius nude dancing and violence through poster-paint fake blood splattered about the place. After seeing El Topo in 1970, Jodorowsky superfan John Lennon famously promoted and yet...

Migration isn’t just a hot-button issue in the political arena. It’s a hot topic in your local arthouse theater, too. At Berlin’s film festival, the subject is everywhere–from Wolfgang Fischer’s Styx and documentaries like Central Airport Thf–perhaps natural for the capital of a country now home to more than a million recent asylum-seekers from the middle east and Africa.

Local boy Christian Petzold’s audacious retelling of Anna Seghers’s World War II-set novel about refugees escaping Nazi-controlled France is a strange, beguiling creation that will be hard to beat in the competition line-up, and ranks as a rare period piece that utterly gets under the skin of contemporary concerns. It’s an engrossing, uncanny and somewhat disturbing film, and completes something of a trio of historical melodramas after Barbara and his worldwide hit Phoenix, but develops the themes of those in an adventurous,...

Here are the best films that happened to land in 2017.

15. Columbus - Kogonada

This is not just about architecture, but about spaces, what it means to share one, and what it means when we leave them. Kogonada, known for his video essays on the work of the greats, never feels textbook; Columbus is only ever steered by its heart.

14. Endless Poetry (PoesÍa Sin Fin) - Alejandro Jodorowsky

Less hard-edged than its predecessor La Danza De La Realidad (The Dance Of Reality) and in turn less overall, Endless Poetry has been labeled Jodorowsky’s most accessible film. It’s still the work of a maestro, and you’ll see nothing else like it (except its superior antecedent).

13. Raw (Grave) - Julia Ducoarnau

Who knew cannibalism would be one of the most eloquent allegories for coming of age, for the hunger and desires your parents once had in youth and feared you might acquire too?...

He's back for more! Chilean cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky has finally begun shooting his most recent feature film Endless Poetry (or Poesía Sin Fin), and even though they're already in production after one round of crowdfunding, they still need more cash. The Indiegogo project intro states: "We are so proud of the magic the whole crew is making... but the money is running out fast and we need your help to make it to the finish line." Some may recall earlier this year, Jodorwsky turned to Kickstarter to get funding for the film securing over $400,000 to successfully give Endless Poetry the greenlight. Now they need more. "Endless Poetry is a tale of poetic experimentation; the story of a unique youth that lived as not many before them had dared: sensually, authentically, freely, madly." This sounds crazy unique and magical, as expected from Jodorowsky, and you can hear more about it...

Cult director sets $150,000 goal to fund post-production.

Veteran filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky has turned to Indiegogo to fund post-production on his latest film, Endless Poetry (Poesía Sin Fin).

The campaign, which has already already raised more than $34,000 towards its goal of $150,000, follows a Kickstarter campaign in February that raised more than $440,000 to help commence production.

The film is first ever co-production between Chile, Japan and France and marks a continuation of Jodorowsky’s autobiographical The Dance Of Reality, which premiered in Cannes’ Directors Fortnight in 2013.

Paris-based Satori Films has joined forces with Chile’s Le Soleil Films and Japan’s Uplink Co on the Spanish-language project, which revolves around Jodorowsky’s life as a poet in Santiago during the 1940s.

The second round of fundraising comes midway through the Chilean shoot, which began on July 1 and is being shot by Christopher Doyle.

According to the project’s Indiegogo page, the campaign is an attempt to augment a post-production...