(Long live death)
Directed by Fernando Arrabal
90 minutes
In Spanish with English subtitles

Early in his life Alejandro Jodorowsky worked and created with a Spaniard named Fernando Arrabal. Jodorowsky's first movie was called Fando and Liz, and it was based on a piece written by Arrabal. Also, in 1962 Arrabal co-formed a performance group with Jodorowsky and Roland Topor called the Panic Movement, where they unleashed the most volatile performances imaginable. All of Arrabal's work was marked by a wild and vivid imagination—he could take the most mundane situation and turn it into a masterpiece of surrealism. In short, he was like an LSD trip, but without the need of taking drugs.

This flick was Arrabal's debut as a director, and is largely autobiographical—a surrealist take on his own childhood during the Spanish Civil War, when his own mother was a fascist. The movie was shot in Algeria, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Brazil, Philippines, Morocco and Tunisia. It focuses on the life of a 10-year-old boy named Fando and his friend Thérèse, both of whom are trying to make sense of the world during wartime, especially the arrest of Fando's father who was accused of being a communist. The film follows a playful logic of memories and dreams—a vision of the world seen from the perspective of a child before his mind has been hardwired, and nailed down with logic and obedience. So in that way, signals are often mixed in this crazy flick, especially between life, sex and death. The horrors of war are also thrown into the mix, and even though the film is hallucinatory and surreal, there's clearly an antiwar statement. It is the kind of film that comes from the 1970s, where single images within the story can become haunting. 

Anyone who knows anything about Alejandro Jodorowsky, knows he believed in catharsis—that a shocking jolt can shatter everything you believe in and take you to a higher level. How did the song go? Anyone coming to this movie should expect the same—this is not a nice tame little movie to kill your time with—it is ecstatic, wild and compulsive, visionary and revelatory.