Jodorowsky’s Dune

This screening took place on Sunday, November 23, 2014 at 6:00 pmYukon Arts Centre

Looking for a sci-fi film with the craziest, most uninhibited imagination? Jodorowsky's Dune, a loving testament to ambition, unpacks the pre-production of a legendary never-shot epic: a messianic adventure that had the money come through in 1974, would have undoubtedly steered Hollywood in a wilder direction than Star Wars. If you only know David Lynch's take on the novel Dune, brace yourself: this version would have featured Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí, Mick Jagger, the gargoyles of future Alien designer H.R. Giger and the music of Pink Floyd, the riding high on The Dark Side of the Moon. At the helm of the aborted project was Alejandro Jodorowsky, the unparalleled hallucinator of midnight classics El Tapo and The Holy Mountain. Featuring incredible interviews, rare drawings, and archival material, Jodorowsky reveals a jaw dropping story. Parental guidance is advised for some violent and sexual images and drug references. "For anyone with even a glancing interest in sci-fi filmmaking, Jodorowsky assembled basically an all-star superhero team to bring his vision of Herbert's novel to the screen (. . .) hearing him talk about how he essentially seduced each one of them aboard makes for utterly joyous entertainment" - The Playlist "At its most heightened state of geek arousal, Frank Pavich’s Jodorowsky’s Dune imagines an alternate pop-cultural universe where an unmade movie changed everything. Had Alejandro Jodorowsky, the functioningly crazed Chilean-born director of such brain-melting midnight-movie staples as El Topo and The Holy Mountain, been able to realize his dream of adapting Frank Herbert’s cult-venerated science-fiction tome Dune back in the mid-seventies, would Star Wars, franchise-driven blockbusterism and the whole comic-book-driven movie universe we now inhabit have evolved differently? In all likelihood, Jodorowsky’s Dune was doomed and delusional from the outset – though the advent of CGI might yet resurrect it – at least as a real movie circa 1975. But it’s as a fantasy that it not only thrived but persisted. A movie of the imagination that could never have been as good as the one projected in our head." - Geoff Pevere, The Globe and Mail