A King and His Movie (1986)

Argentinean director Carlos Sorin took his own frustrating experiences trying film a movie about the true story of a man who, in 1860, declared himself the King of Patagonia, and formed them into this wild, surreal, and funny first movie. A film about the making of a film, Mr. Sorin details the struggles of a director and his producer in securing funding and adequate performers for this planned location shoot. Soon, however, the production runs into difficulties with its cast of local "talent" and with its financial backers. Virtually deserted by his cast and crew near the end of the shoot, the fictional director decides to finish the film completely alone, working only with a bizarre landscape populated by mannequins. Freely moving from the film-within-a-film to its surrounding story, Sorin etches a parallel between the King of Patagonia and the film director, both of whom are driven by something like madness.