Endless Poetry

Endless Poetry (Poesía sin fin, 2016) is an autobiographical fantasy you can watch online on iFILM, written and directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky. His son Adan Jodorowsky plays the young Alejandro; the director himself appears as the narrator looking back across decades. A co-production spanning Chile, France, the UK, Japan, and Mexico.

Set in 1940s Santiago, the film follows young Alejandro as he breaks free from a merchant father who wants him to study medicine and become useful. Instead he disappears into the city's bohemian underground — befriending the Chilean poet Enrique Lihn, falling into and out of love with a woman he turns into a muse, and slowly building the sense that poetry is not a career choice but the only accurate way to describe being alive. Jodorowsky layers memory and hallucination without labeling which is which.

This is the second chapter of the director's self-portrait cycle, picking up where The Dance of Reality (2013) left off. It is extravagant, theatrical, and completely unbothered by conventional film grammar — which is either the appeal or the barrier depending on the viewer. For anyone interested in what it looks like when a filmmaker refuses to separate art from autobiography, stream Endless Poetry online on iFILM.