Family genealogy, the power of imagination over objective reality, and the spiritual path from a traumatic childhood to artistic enlightenment. The Film: The Dance of Reality (2013)
Yet, Jodorowsky does not idealize her. Sara is also a mother who abandons her son. She is complicit in the abuse. The film’s genius lies in how it handles this paradox. During a traumatic scene where young Alejandro is forced to scrub the floor of a public latrine with his tongue as punishment for wetting the bed, the camera turns magical. The feces turn into gold dust. The humiliation becomes a ritual of purification. This is the "dance"—the ability to see the sacred in the profane. alejandro jodorowsky la danza de la realidad
In the 2013 film, Jodorowsky rejects traditional realism. He treats the past not as a fixed record, but as a flexible space for reinvention. Family genealogy, the power of imagination over objective
For those familiar with Jodorowsky’s therapeutic system, Psychomagic , the film is a manual. Psychomagic posits that psychological trauma cannot be healed by talking about it; it must be healed by symbolic acts. La Danza de la Realidad is the ultimate psychomagical act. By casting his 70-year-old son to play his abusive father, and by literally re-enacting his own birth, his own beatings, and his own salvation, Jodorowsky is not just remembering the past—he is rewriting it. She is complicit in the abuse
In the pantheon of cinema, there are filmmakers who entertain, those who inform, and then there is Alejandro Jodorowsky. The Chilean-French surrealist, shaman, and provocateur does not make movies to be passively watched; he makes films to be experienced, endured, and metabolized.
Alejandro Jodorowsky is a filmmaker, playwright, poet, and mystic who has spent decades dismantling the boundaries between art and therapy. His 2013 film, La Danza de la Realidad (The Dance of Reality), serves as a monumental return to cinema after a twenty-three-year hiatus. It is more than a traditional biopic; it is a vivid exercise in "psychomagic," a term Jodorowsky coined to describe the use of symbolic performance to heal psychological wounds. By revisiting his childhood in the Chilean town of Tocopilla, Jodorowsky transforms his personal history into a universal myth, proving that while we cannot change the past, we can change our perception of it.
