Poesía sin fin, by Alejandro Jodorowsky - feature film

Poesía sin fin, the second part of an autobiographical five-part work by Alejandro Jodorowsky (1929), is about his life as an adolescent in Santiago de Chile. This film also shows Jodorowsky's predilection for surrealism and symbolism, but because the spirit of Federico Fellini seems to be around in this film, the surrealism is playful and light. The characters in the film evoke a recognizable Fellini atmosphere, and the autobiographical retrospective is also reminiscent of Fellini.

In a mixture of fiction and reality, the character Jodorowsky appears in some scenes in different ages at the same time, creating multiple perspectives on the events of his life. One of the defining aspects is young Alejandro's struggle with his father's ideas and beliefs. In Poesía sin fin, Alejandro discovers poetry, which his father wants to keep him far from in order to make him a "real man. Alejandro flees his parental home and is taken in by a group of artists in Santiago. In that company he discovers poetry, which from then on becomes a defining factor in his life.

Poesía sin fin is also largely about friendship. In a beautiful scene we see how Alejandro visits the poet Enrique Lihn (Leandro Taub) and proposes to him that they become friends; in an experiment they walk in a straight line through the city without leaving each other's side, even though they have to go straight through houses and over cars and other obstacles to do so. But betrayal and forgiveness are also important. The political context is set in a few symbols: a crowd of people with masks instead of faces runs after a leader on horseback.

Alejandro literally goes against the flow and finally decides to leave his friends in Santiago and go to France. On the quay this time is his father, the father he has never seen again in reality, but to whom he speaks through the film in a wonderful final scene.