Extraordinary Stories

A homemade megaproduction -- a four-hour movie with 40 locations (including, incredibly, Mozambique), 50 actors, and dozens of stories, and made for less than $50,000 -- Extraordinary Stories defies both conventional models of production and the norms of narrative cinema. Across 18 chapters, three main stories, and a handful of secondary ones, director Mariano Llinás both lightly parodies his film's genre-hybridized being (road movie, thriller, love story, adventure, war film) whilst still keeping the feeling of each constituent part, and offers a Borgesian commentary on storytelling, aiming less to tell stories than to sketch them.