BY DIRECTOR: J

Jim Jarmusch is recognised as one of American cinema's most idiosyncratic directors, with standstill camerawork and an unhurried narrative pace as trademarks of his work. He has collaborated with many musicians, either as composers or actors, such as Neil Young and Tom Waits. 'Stranger than Paradise', won the Golden Camera at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, and is considered a landmark in modern independent cinema.

One of the great cult filmmaker, Chilean-born Alejandro Jodorowsky invented the Midnight Movie with 'El Topo' (1970). His drug-addled, psychedelic Western defies any simple categorisation as it charts the journey of a black-clad gunfighter and a young child across a bleak, sparsely populated landscape. Violent, dream-like and eroticised to the hilt, its only points of comparison are the films Jodorowsky made after it. 'The Holy Mountain' (1973) is no less strange or compelling. The filmmaker then spent some years attempting to film Frank Herbert's 'Dune' – the subject of the entertaining 'Jodorowsky's Dune' (2013) – before embarking on 'Tusk' (1980) and, at the end of the decade, arguably his finest film 'Santa Sangre' (1989). In recent years, he has blended his unique vision of the world with his own history in the semi-autobiographical 'The Dance of Reality' (2013) and 'Endless Poetry' (2016).