Santa Sangre (English: Holy Blood) is a 1989 avant-garde surreal horror film directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky and written by Jodorowsky along with Claudio Argento and Roberto Leoni. It stars Axel Jodorowsky, Adán Jodorowsky, Teo Jodorowsky, Blanca Guerra, Thelma Tixou, and Guy Stockwell. An international co-production of Mexico and Italy, the film is set in Mexico, and tells the story of Fenix, a boy who grew up in a circus and his struggle with childhood trauma. It is signed on Empire magazine's 2008 list of the 500 Greatest Movies of All Time...
"Fenix is a young man confined to a Mexican asylum where day after day doctors try to bring him out of his bewildered monkey-like mental state – his room is outfitted with a specifically tailored basket and a nine feet tall tree that he likes to sit in and he eats raw fish. From there we flash back to his childhood, a time where he grew up as a circus musician, who while living with his distant knife-throwing father Orgo and acrobat with a cult leader hobby mother Concha, finds only friends in both Aladdin and the clowns. Fenix’s young life starts to be thrown into turmoil over various major events: from watching his mother’s church bulldozed, to having a grandiose funeral for one of the circus’ elephants entailing a construction trash container sized coffin, to finally the dissolution of his parents’ marriage at the hands of Orgo’s affair with the circus’s tattooed-woman, and ending with the girl that he liked named Alma being taken away....
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