Movies: Raúl Ruiz

In this mystical comedy, Felicien has traveled to Portugal from France soon after the end of the First World War. It seems that his recently deceased father had invested a lot of money in a factory located in a remote village, and he has come to eval...

A surreal odyssey in which a melancholic maidservant crosses paths with a homicidal little boy, travels to a tiny island of pirates and encounters a man with multiple personalities....

Jim is a small child who lives in an inn run by his parents. The arrival of a strange captain to the Island they live will trouble his existence and tip him into an universe of adventures....

The house of the director has a door out to the sidewalk. This gate separates the inside from the outside. The interior contains the filmmaker's personal story and his world of objects, thoughts and imaginations. Outer space contains the city of Sant...

A drama centered on an office worker on the verge of retirement who begins to relive both real and imagined memories....

The film captures the activities of the inhabitants in the countryside, in southern Chile, and the CORA (Corporation for Agrarian Reform). Although the action was filmed in four days and four nights in 1971, the movie was only finished in France in 1...

Surreal gothic comedy about a gambler who wins a strange Chilean mansion and takes his frail wife there....

Confusing realities surface in this paranoid film dealing with the fragile nature of a young woman recovering from rape and an apparent attempted suicide. In one reality, she is a killer destroyer of men. In another she is the new wife on a Jamaican ...

When the child Manuel wanders into a garden that is off-limits to him, he meets an unidentified fisherman, and another boy -- the boy is actually himself several years down the road. Manuel experiences three different versions of his encounters in th...

Madeleine is with her lover, Jean-Paul, when her husband arrives home and catches the two together. Madeleine kills her husband and tells Jean-Paul to flee before the police arrive. After Jean-Paul drives away, he picks up a hitchhiker. When the car,...

A charming tale of murder, perversity and narrative echoes told through shots of barking dogs and a La jetée-like series of stills....

A satirical take on President Salvador Allende's Popular Unity process prior to the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. The film is made up of a series of short stories, in which different worlds cross paths....

Raoul Ruiz shot this film on March 28th, 1971, during the big peasant march in Temuco, Chile, when the bill that gave the full citizenship and civil rights to the Mapuche Indio people was approved. Raoul Ruiz listens to their painful stories....

A parody of anthropology, linguistics, and cultural imperialism. The film follows an unlikely team of linguists into the wilds of an ersatz Patagonia to study the last speakers of a dying language. That language apparently consists of a single word, ...

Absurdist short about a man with a suitcase and a man inside that suitcase....

A man awakens to find himself immersed in a real-life scenario of a board game with an ever expanding cartography....

A small group of well-to-do vacationers go on a hiking trip into the woods. Foolishly unprepared to deal with Mother Nature and their situation, they wander around lost for days and weeks, becoming more and more fatigued, hungry, and desperate. A bri...

A serious young man of free spirit is forced by his surroundings to become rich at all costs. A group of blind children tries to open the eyes of the unbelievers to the Christian faith. Retired nuns who open a brothel, to pay the running costs of the...

The film revolves around the concept of soap opera. Its structure is based on the assumption that Chilean reality does not exist, but rather is an ensemble of soap operas....

Ruiz on the film: "I began La présence réelle (The Real Presence) first. I. N. A. had commissioned me to produce a personal vision of the Festival d'Avignon. This became a fiction about the theater because if I had filmed the actual performances at A...