Fando y Lis

Fando y Lis in this stunning new, 4k restoration overseen by director Alejandro Jodorowsky. Fando, and his crippled partner Lis, seek the legendary fabled city of Tar, where Lis hopes to be cured of her handicap. She is haunted by her past as a little girl tormented by adults. Fando, sometimes resentful, has taken on the burden of carrying her or pushing her on a wobbly ramshackle cart to reach their goal. Together, they wander a stark landscape of ruins and rubble, populated with characters of the bizarre, grotesque, licentious and salacious. Fando Y Lis can be seen as a brutal and scathing examination of the destructive co-dependence of two lovers conflicted by anguish and demands they put on one another, each unable to live without the other, pushing to the point of violence, exploitation, and madness. On another level, it is an allegory of the unconscious, internal passions and demons of the individual, torn between expectations and the lustful, torrid hidden desires and fears. Using a one-page script adapted from Fernando Arrabel’s stage play, which was a staple of the avant-garde PANIC theater in Mexico City, where Jodorowsky was a director, staging hundreds of plays. The film was shot for approximately the equivalent of $25,000 today. Lis was played by Tamara Garina, a well know pop singer in Mexico looking to break from her good girl image. Alejandro makes a short appearance as a puppeteer who torments the child Lis.   Seen at the time as blasphemous and irreverent, Fando Y Lis caused a riot at the Mexican premiere where the director’s life was threatened. The film was vilified and subsequently banned. Decades later, Alejandro is celebrated as the maestro of Mexican art cinema.