The Story
The wager, the wagon, and the sixteenth birthday that changes everything.
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A Film Archive · Est. 2009
Step through the mirror. Choose your own imagination.
A travelling theatre offers its audience an impossible choice: the dull road behind them, or a doorway into the boundless, dangerous world inside Doctor Parnassus’s own mind.
Est. 2009
An ancient wager, a travelling stage
For a thousand years, Doctor Parnassus has staked pieces of his soul on a running wager with a figure known only as Mr. Nick. His travelling show — a horse-drawn stage that unfolds into a curtained mirror — invites passers-by to cross into the Imaginarium, a landscape built from whatever they carry inside them.
When the troupe pulls a stranger named Tony from beneath a bridge, half-hanged and half-remembered, the wager tightens around a new and far more personal prize: the doctor’s own daughter, Valentina, who turns sixteen in a matter of days.
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Explore the archive
Three ways into the world
The Company
Doctor Parnassus, Mr. Nick, Valentina, Anton, Percy — and the many faces of Tony.
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The Imaginarium
Staircases to the moon, forests that grow downward, and a mirror that never shows the same face twice.
Step inside →- Director
- Terry Gilliam
- Premiere
- Cannes, 2009
- Genre
- Fantasy · Drama
- Running Time
- 123 Minutes
Nothing is permanent. Not even death. — Mr. Nick
This archive also preserves the production’s most remarkable chapter: how a film built around one actor’s face was reimagined, mid-shoot, around three. Read the production notes →