“There’s always three incarnations of a story: the story that is being told, the listener’s interpretation and the version the listener retells in the future.”
—Tarsem, in interview with Benjamin Crossley-Marra of

　　“It is almost impossible to describe.”
—Roger Ebert, on The Fall, in the Chicago Sun-Times

　　A film that asks us to believe in one scenario is challenge enough; and, a film that asks us to believe in two very different scenarios can overwhelm, especially if one is presented as reality and the other as fantasy, or if one scenario is presented as the past and one as the future, and that difficulty may be the case with films such as Yo Ho Ho and The Fall. Is it possible to hold two very different visions in mind at once? Writing about the 1981 Bulgarian film Yo Ho Ho directed by Zako Heskija, a film about the relationship between two hospital patients, one patient a despairing and storytelling actor with a broken spine and the other a ten-year old boy with a broken arm, the writer Branislav L. Slantchev, who first saw the film when he was in second grade and then again about twenty-five years later, considered his viewing experiences of the film and wrote, “I find myself drawn by the hospital scenes (depicting reality) and find the fantasy somewhat annoying, even as I understand that it is crucial to the story. I do not know whether to deplore that pirates no longer seem that exciting or to welcome the deeper understanding of the themes in the film. It is quite ironic really that by the time one can intellectually grasp the significance of imagination, one is largely deprived of its flights of fancy by the inexorable march of logic” (in a review appearing on the website Gotterdammerung, 2005).

　　In Yo Ho Ho, the actor tells the boy Leonid a story about pirates involving an international ship’s crew, including an African, an Asian, a native American, and various