"L’Atalante from Jean Vigo. I discovered this film when I started to have growing interest in movies. That movie is from the 1930s. It was shot with very little money, and the director was sick. I mean, it’s pure poetry. This movie, it’s a very simple story, and you have Michel Simon, who plays an amazing character. It’s just a great combination of a vision that’s close to surrealism and a Grecian film look. It’s extremely touching."

"“Rocketman” was brilliantly executed. The magical surrealism from the first performances align us with what the uber-talented Elton must have been feeling at the Troubadour as he literally got his wings, while taking us from the starting point of how his alienation as a child led to his self-loathing and problems with drinking and drugs. Wrapping layers of glitter and glam around himself like armor to cover the pain created the icon of Elton John we know today."

"A novel that has as its main character an Old Lady who is liberated from the boredom of her secure life at an eccentric home for elderly ladies when given a hearing trumpet — and whose wish to go to the North pole before she dies comes true in the most unlikely fashion — has to be good. Even though she is better known as one of the best painters of Surrealism Leonora Carrington’s novels and short stories have had a strong influence on feminist and fantastic fiction. Constantly entertaining and unpredictable The Hearing Trumpet is infused with warmth and rebellion in equal measures."

"I want to start off with a film you’ve probably seen called Mind Game, by Masaaki Yuasa. It’s a very interesting story. It’s a Japanese film; it’s not anime. It’s very western, actually. It came out in 2005, and critics panned it in Japan, and therefore the producers lost their nerve and shelved the film, which is very sad. I saw it at the Asian Film Festival, and I think you can see it online, but to me, it’s the Citizen Kane of animation. It is such an ambitious and visually unique film. It’s just full of action and full of crazy ideas and surrealism and humor and just beautiful, beautiful craftsmanship."

"I was completely unprepared when I saw Mulholland Dr. in a small art-house cinema in Stockholm, and it blew my mind. I came out of the movie and just felt like I needed to talk to people and ask questions, like, did you see what I saw? It was huge for me, and it almost felt like, you can’t mess with people like this and get away with it, somebody should do something about it. Usually when American cinema tries to be surreal or nonlinear or non-narrative, it turns either really pretentious or really Hollywood. But David Lynch, in this film but also in general, is probably the only person I know who has succeeded in making his own version of American surrealism."

"This is a really obscure one, but there’s a really weird French-Canadian movie called Leolo. Roger Ebert loved it. He gave it a four-star review when it came out. The filmmaker, Jean-Claude Lauzon… He made two movies and then he died. It’s a really tragic story. It’s this surreal, messed-up story about a kid whose family is going insane, and so he comes up with these fantastical stories to escape from his world. I saw that movie when I was in high school, and it just made such an impression on me because of the way it balanced humor and absurdity, and surrealism, and then just tragedy. It’s great. I should probably see it again. I haven’t seen it in a couple of years, so I want to make sure it still stands up. That movie is another very particularly strange coming-of-age movie that will always be a reference for me."