‘Aleph’: A Borges-Inspired Odyssey Around the Globe [ND/NF Review]

A consummate man of letters, Jorge Luis Borges frequently receives the vague honorific of being a ‘writer’s writer,” often a fancy way of saying that his work is too complicated to adapt to film. Borges’ fascination with symbols and language, our imperfect tools for conceiving the world, manifested in stories where literary sleight of hand turns the mundane inside out to find the miraculous, where maps overtake the territory they represent and one walks in labyrinths without end. With no lack of ambition, Belgrade-born, Brooklyn-based filmmaker Iva Radivojević has embraced the difficulty of visualizing some of Borges’ abstract concepts in her second feature, “Aleph,” a thought-provoking experiment that takes the viewer around the world physically and intellectually.

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