TREASURE ISLAND (Church of Film)

“My story begins with a misunderstanding…” says young Jonathan, who falls asleep watching a popular adventure TV show, and falls into a dream world of mysterious strangers, intrigues, and incomprehensible games. A world where he is Jim Hawkins from Robert Louis Stevenson’s TREASURE ISLAND! One of Chilean Surrealist Raul Ruiz’s dearest ambitions was to adapt the childrens’ classic for film, and so he did, with money from a big name American distributor and instructions not to deviate from the text. He deviated from all of it. Starring Anna Karina, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Martin Landau, and pop singer Sheila, Ruiz’s TREASURE ISLAND is a masterfully labyrinthine surrealist metatext, and a full dynamite-charged brain-blown deconstruction of children’s literature and adventure cinema, in a free-flowing logic of media and dreams.