Raúl Ruiz

Socialist Realism (2023)

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. ...

The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror (2020)

A man's wife commits suicide and appears to him as a ghost. The ghost follows him everywhere – under the bed, under tables… After seeing the ghost so frequently, the man begins to resemble her. ...

The Wandering Soap Opera (2018)

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. ...

A Closed Book (2012)

Jane appears to be ideal: attractive, intelligent, unruffled by her employer's abrupt eccentricities. But, gradually, we come aware that Jane has another agenda. Incrementally, Sir Paul's familiar surroundings are altered. His housekeeper is diverted away, ...

Night Across the Street (2012)

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

Ballet aquatique (2012)

In one of his very last projects, Raul Ruiz celebrates the films of his historical predecessor Jean Painlevé, a documentary innovator whose work always blended science with surrealism. Ruiz and friends further perfect the art of mystification. Why it is ...

Epistolar (2012)

A coin and a cup of coffee on a table top. Raúl Ruiz gets the most from this minimal set-up, both visually and through the laconic soundtrack. ...

Mysteries of Lisbon (2010)

The tragic story of the many lives of Father Dinis, his dark origins and his pious works, and the different fates of all those who, trapped in a sinister web of love, hate and crime, cross paths with him through years of adventure and misfortune in the con ...

Nucingen House (2009)

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

Secrets (2008)

After long decades of exile, a leftist former activist returns to Chile to settle accounts with his conscience, related to the death of a colleague and political hero . The task of Atalibar is to reveal his secret. But his view clashes with the current cou ...

The Suitcase (2008)

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

To Each His Own Cinema (2007)

Commissioned to mark the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, "To Each His Own Cinema" brought together 33 of the world's pre-eminent filmmakers to produce short pieces exploring the multifarious facets of cinema and their perspective on the state ...

La Recta Provincia (2007)

This was a man. He lived with his mother. He cared a manor house in the countryside of Chile. One day the man found a bone in the garden. The bone was bored. That was a bone flute. The man with the flute music play. And music song became. The voice of the ...

Klimt (2006)

A portrait of Austrian artist Gustav Klimt whose lavish, sexual paintings came to symbolize the art nouveau style of the late 19th and early 20th century. ...

The Lost Domain (2005)

Set in 1973 during the coup d'etat in Chile, Max recalls his encounters in London during World War II with French aviator Antoine, a childhood hero he first met in his native country one morning in 1932 and who initiated him to the wonders of aviation. ...

Days in the Country (2004)

In a bar in Santiago, two old men talk over their past. This is a strange discussion. In fact, they talk of themselves as if they were dead. We don't know what is true or false, what is dream or reality. ...

Edipo (2004)

The film was made from the show Edipo Iperboreo (1989), directed by Ruiz. The shooting took place in Buti (Villa Medicea, Castello di Buti and the old Cinema di Cascine di Buti). The Fondazione Pontedera Teatro was able to complete production of the film i ...

Vertige de la page blanche (2003)

A film festival jury, composed of film professionals, judges a film about a court in which three terrorists who allegedly kidnapped a judge to try him are put on trial. ...

A Place Among the Living (2003)

A mediocre pulp novelist is approached by a stranger claiming to be a serial killer with a proposition to chronicle his crimes. ...

That Day (2003)

A father is scheming to have his slightly mental daughter from an earlier marriage killed by allowing a murderous psychopath to be released from the asylum and led to his house. However, the psychopath and the daughter fall for each other. ...

Médée: Chronique d’une mise en scène (2003)

A chronicle of Raúl Ruiz's production of Michèle Reverdy's opera "Médée". ...

Cofralandes, Chilean Rhapsody (2002)

An experimental four-part 2002 Franco-Chilean digital video series written and directed by Raúl Ruiz. The first part won a FIPRESCI Award at the Montreal World Film Festival in 2002 "for the director's personal exploration into his homeland, using DV in a ...

Miotte by Ruiz (2002)

In the early 2000s filmmaker Raul Ruiz followed painter Jean Miotte to different locations (New York, France, Germany). ...

Savage Souls (2001)

At a wake one night in 1945, a group of aged women recall the life of one of their number. Sixty years before, Thérèse was barely 20 years old when she eloped with her boyfriend, Firmin, a blacksmith, to Châtillon, a town in Provence. Here, she makes th ...

Love Torn in a Dream (2000)

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 conve ...

Comedy of Innocence (2000)

Today, Camille turns nine. He had sworn that on his 9th birthday he would show his parents the videos he was shooting on the side - the tail of a cat scampering away, a window, and a veiled woman's face - an intriguing picture... Later that day, Camille's ...

Time Regained (1999)

In early 1920s France, an author, lying on his deathbed, looks at various photographs and is flooded with memories of the people and events that have shaped his life. ...

Shattered Image (1998)

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 honeym ...

L'Inconnu de Strasbourg (1998)

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, stole ...

The Film to Come (1997)

If any single piece can act as a key to Ruiz, it may be the 1997 short Le Film à Venir (The Film to Come). The titular film is a holy fragment of celluloid that can only be seen by a secret society known as the Philokinetes. They watch it on a loop, somna ...

Genealogies of a Crime (1997)

An attorney defends a young man on trial for killing his aunt — a psychiatrist who took him in to study possible homicidal tendencies. ...

Elle (1996)

The story of a neurotic bachelor who, after marrying a beautiful woman, submits her to increasingly deranged accusations of infidelity and pleas for forgiveness. ...

Three Lives and Only One Death (1996)

Four intertwining stories of bizarre occurrences in Paris featuring a man who was stolen away by fairies, a professor who becomes a tramp, the lovers who inherit a chateau – and the last tale that connects all that has gone before. ...

Concerning Nice (1995)

Anthology of short films about the French city of Nice, by various directors. A homage to Jean Vigo and his "À propos de Nice" from 1930. ...

Fado, Major and Minor (1995)

Pierre, a middle-aged tourist guide, is the victim of a sudden failure : he does not recognize anything about him any longer. He goes back home and in his apartment he finds a mysterious young man who tells him he is here to avenge a young woman who has ta ...

Wind Water (1995)

In Wind Water, Ruiz stages a three-way dialogue between three great cultures: the West, China and Arabia. He imagines what might occur if Shih-T'ao's six poetic procedures for attaining the primal respiration or cosmic breath in painting were applied to on ...

Chapter 66 (1994)

A wild short made as part of a filmmaking workshop that Raúl Ruiz ran in Bogotá in October 1993. ...

The Clandestine Journey: Lives of Saints and Sinners (1994)

A surreal travel drama, shot on Sicility with Italian actors. IlViaggio Clandestino is a film about saints and sinners. Whether you areblessed or doomed is often dependent on someone's soul that on whether theypray or suffer. The kindred spirit of San Gil ...

Mirror of Tunisia/Tunisia, the Trance and the Stone (1993)

Tunisia itself is the subject; we wanted to render the genius of the site. Tunisia is almost the central character of this little film: we see the relation of the city to the sea, the traces that bear witness to its foundation, the remains of Carthage, the ...

Little White Dove (1992)

A young working class girl falls in love with an upper class boy who is part of the plot to assassinate General Schneider, head of the Chilean Army. The film was shot in 1973 over six weeks with a budget of $170,000. As a result of the 1973 Chilean coup d' ...

Dark at Noon (1992)

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 evaluate t ...

The Solitudes (1992)

"At that time (late 1992), I made a film for British television, Channel 4, called Las Soledades, the name of a long poem by Góngora. It was made in Chile, using many poetic elements of the country. Chile is seen through the eyes of a Chinese painter—a ...

Amelia Lópes O'Neill (1992)

A well-bred young woman who prizes the virtue of fidelity remains faithful to the doctor who deflowers her, even after he marries her invalid sister. ...

Visions and Marvels of the Christian Religion (1992)

All the characters are in hell, but they act as though the are in a sitcom, with canned laughter. It's based on Arcana Celestia by Swedenborg, a Swedish esoteric theologian from the 18th Century who started seeing ghosts, angels and demons around him. Inst ...

Three Crowns of the Sailor (1991)

Shortly after murdering his professor, a young man encounters a sailor who offers him a position on his ship in exchange for 3 Danish crowns and his attention as he recounts his life story. ...

The Golden Boat (1991)

Inspired in form by American police TV shows and soap operas, The Golden Boat is a madcap, surreal dash through the streets of New York city, telling the mysterious and often hilarious story of an aged street-person named Austin, a comically compulsive ass ...

A TV Dante (Cantos 9 to 14) (1991)

These six video segments (10 minutes each) were originally developed for broadcast on Channel 4 as the second installment in the larger, never completed, series comissioned for Peter Greenaway and Tom Philips' A TV Dante (1989). But it was never aired. Ru ...

El arte de poner los cuernos (1991)

Brise-glace (1990)

Collaborative experimental project on which three director made different films about the Swedish icebreaker "Frej". ...

L'Autel de l'amitié (1989)

A series of philosophical dialogues on friendship, architecture, electricity, cannibalism and human rights. ...

Earthen Man (1989)

From the construction of a sculpture "life size" in the earth, the director Boris Lehman imagines a story that staged a sculptor (Paulus Brun) struggling with an impossible order. The man of land is "golemise", takes life in the countryside, and ends up dy ...

Derrière le Mur (1989)

Adaptation of a choreography by Joêlle Bouvier and Régis Obadia ...

Tous les nuages sont des horloges (1988)

A country house in the evening. A couple returns home to find a bailiff inside, busy taking inventory. ...

The Blind Owl (1987)

In Paris, an Arab immigrant working as a projectionist becomes obsessed with a mysterious woman he sees on the cinema screen. Following a visit from a man claiming to be his uncle, his world begins to mirror a macabre and cyclical narrative. ...

Brise-Glace: Histoires de glace (1987)

Third and final part of collaborative project Brise Glace. Directed by Raúl Ruíz. ...

Dog's Dialogue (1987)

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

Life Is a Dream (1987)

A baroque mix of revolutionary politics, pop culture and semiotics loosely based on the play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. A young prince learns that life is just a dream from which we wake when we die. And that dreams may be as real as life. ...

Professor Taranne (1987)

Professor Taranne, a conceited university Professor, is subject to several absurd and disquieting incidents from the world surrounding him. He is being accused of things he couldn't have been doing. He starts doubting himself - a self that might be fragmen ...

Mammame (1986)

A Ruizian adaptation of Jean-Claude Gallotta's iconic wordless ballet choreography. ...

Dans un miroir (1986)

A man comes to visit an acquaintance who is supposed to be sick and talks to his sister while he is waiting. ...

Treasure Island (1986)

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. ...

Richard III (1986)

Richard of Gloucester uses murder and manipulation to claim England's throne. ...

The Insomniac on the Bridge (1985)

This quickly-filmed avant-garde farce by prolific director Raul Ruiz features an insomniac (Michel Lonsdale) whose main preoccupation is surreptitiously watching private matters -- he is a voyeur. He and an equally disreputable acquaintance rape a woman al ...

Régime sans pain (1985)

Régime sans pain, influenced by (Ruiz's) friend Jean Baudrillard (and calling) to mind grade-Z SF, grew out of a commission to direct a music video (featuring French cult rock duo of Angèle/Maimone). Ruiz offered a counterproposal that he direct several ...

Notre mariage (1985)

A sickly young girl is given away by her father to a childless couple. Twenty years later, she marries her adopted father. ...

7 False Connections (1984)

Short film showing cinematographer Henri Alekan, director Raúl Ruiz and actress Olimpia Carlisi at work creating sublime visual effects of the sort seen in City of Pirates. ...

Manoel’s Destinies (1984)

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 the gard ...

Voyage of a Hand (1984)

In Voyage of a Hand, Ruiz constructs another of his concentric labyrinths that hits us right in the multifaceted center of our confusion. We might decide that what we receive was a story full of intentions; or we might decide that it was a spineless joke e ...

The Real Presence (1984)

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 Avign ...

Vanishing Point (1984)

An island retreat. A man, his face bandaged, plays cards nonchalantly. His ex-wife arrives. Conversations happen. ...

City of Pirates (1984)

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. ...

Bérénice (1983)

Now Titus' father has died, the new emperor will be free to marry his beloved Bérénice. Also In love with Bérénice, Titus' friend Antiochus plans to flee Rome rather than face the marriage. However, public opinion about the pairing causes Titus to choo ...

The Return of a Library Lover (1983)

Ruiz, rediscovering the things of his past in Chile ten years after the Coup, regards them now with the eyes of another world. This other world is cinema, the mechanical gaze of a Super 8 camera. This eye sees very deeply, even beyond reality and brute mem ...

Querelle de jardins (1982)

Raul Ruiz filmed the gardens of the Château de Versailles. The first one, French, focuses on the King's Square (a space where everything is arranged in order to be seen). The other one, English, is the exact opposite, because from any point within it, one ...

On Top of the Whale (1982)

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, which ...

Chinese Shadows (1982)

A series of compounding dramatic situations, drawn from Georges Polti's '36 Dramatic Situations' and acted out in shadowplay and voiceover. ...

The Territory (1981)

A small group of well-to-do vacationers go on a hiking trip into the woods just to find themselves mysteriously lost. ...

Image de sable (1981)

Ruiz's short about Pieter Wiersma, a Dutch sculptor who makes intricate sandcastles. ...

Snakes and Ladders (1980)

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

Pages d'un catalogue (1980)

Filmed during the exhibition of the painter Dali at Beaubourg. ...

Of Great Events and Ordinary People (1980)

In 1978, Ruiz was commissioned to make a television documentary about the French elections from the viewpoint of a Chilean exile in Paris' eleventh arrondissement. But, contrary to the producers' expectation, the Left lost. Ruiz seized on this anti-climax ...

The New City (1980)

Short documentary film on the construction of the new town, Marne-la-Vallée. ...

The One-Eyed Man (1980)

With his body now devoid of substance and able to fly, N. wanders looking for a way to return to life and reintegrate into the world. ...

Petit manuel d'histoire de France (1979)

The most critically celebrated Rue essay of 1979 was the two-part Petit Manuel d'Histoire de France, directed by the exiled Chilean filmmaker Raul Ruiz, who brought to this commission some of the stylistic fabulism for which he was becoming known in avant- ...

Images de débats (1979)

Reflections on television debate and rhetoric through impromptu discussions. ...

The Suspended Vocation (1978)

The film centers on a Dominican monk named Jérôme (played by one actor in colour and another actor in black-and-white) and his interactions with various higher-ups within the French Catholic Church. Ruiz's intention was to reflect the ideological argumen ...

The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978)

Two narrators, one seen and one unseen, discuss possible connections between a series of paintings. The on-screen narrator walks through three-dimensional reproductions of each painting, featuring real people, sometimes moving, in an effort to explain the ...

Dora and the Magic Lantern (1978)

Eleven-year old Dora (Nathalie Manet) is forced to chase after clues concerning her inventor-father's death while being chased by thugs working for big industry. Not only is she seeking to understand her father's mysterious death, but some of the clues he ...

The Divisions of Nature (1978)

Ruiz on the film: "Les Divisions is a documentary about the Château de Chambord and the title comes from the Divisione of Johannes Scotus (Erigena), the ninth century Irish philosopher (who was a 'realist', although the film is more 'nominalist' in charac ...

Utopia: The Scattered Body and the World Upside Down (1976)

Two salesmen in Honduras are looking everywhere for their lost pal. ...

Sotelo (1976)

A documentary on the exiled Chilean painter Sotelo which focuses on the painter's voice rather than the paintings themselves. ...

Dialogues of the Exiles (1975)

Chilean exiles in Paris discuss the problems facing them. They kidnap and attempt to re-educate a touring singer from their fatherland. ...

La Femme au foyer (1975)

The life of a right-wing housewife in Chile during the prior days to Salvador Allende's military overthrow. ...

The Expropriation (1974)

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 1973, a ...

Abastecimiento (1973)

It explores the problem of the shortage caused in Chile during the Unidad Popular. It shows the actions of a minister, a bourgeois housewife and a grassroots group of the JAP (Juntas de Abastecimiento y Precios) promoted by the government to alleviate this ...

What Is to Be Done? (1972)

Mordant, self-aware, freighted with sensitivity toward Chile's problem, wary of caricature, disposed toward consciousness of human fallibility, it is a deft blend of fiction and documentary set in the tumultuous days leading up to the election of Salvador ...

Now We're Going to Call You Brother (1971)

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. ...

Nobody Said Anything (1971)

Four drunken literary bohemians write a short story about a pact with the Devil just as that very story is happening to them. ...

The Penal Colony (1970)

A foreign journalist arrives on a small Pacific island 200 miles off the coast of South America. Once a leper colony, the island was later transformed into a prison and then, under U.N. mandate, made into an independent republic. Yet despite democratic str ...

Three Sad Tigers (1968)

A glimpse at the few days and nights in the lives of a brother and sister, Amanda and Tito, in Santiago's semi-criminal underworld. A rambling portrait of Chilean society. ...

Inner Sage / Outer King (2018)

On Raúl Ruiz's missing Taiwanese film "La comédie des ombres" and the projection of Clark's "Double Ghost" at the Chin Pao Shan cemetery on 19 august 2018 (anniversary of Ruiz's death and Clark's birthday). ...

Exote: Filming Of The Wandering Soap Opera (2017)

A documentary recorded during the filming of "The Wandering Soap Opera" by Raúl Ruiz. Made in 1990 and completed 27 years later, in 2017. The film brings closer the approach in Ruiz's directing style and his personal vision of Cinema. ...

What Now? Remind Me (2014)

Joaquim Pinto has been living with HIV and VHC for almost twenty years. "What now? Remind Me" is the notebook of a year of clinical studies with toxic, mind altering drugs as yet unapproved. An open and eclectic reflection on time and memory, on epidemics ...

The Other Day (2012)

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 Santiago d ...

Ballet aquatique (2012)

In one of his very last projects, Raul Ruiz celebrates the films of his historical predecessor Jean Painlevé, a documentary innovator whose work always blended science with surrealism. Ruiz and friends further perfect the art of mystification. Why it is ...

Epistolar (2012)

A coin and a cup of coffee on a table top. Raúl Ruiz gets the most from this minimal set-up, both visually and through the laconic soundtrack. ...

L'Imprésario (2010)

In the fall of 2010, Bozon and co-conspirator Pascale Bodet commandeered the first floor of Paris's famed Centre Pompidou for 10 days of screenings, lectures and performances that amounted to a counter-canonical history of French cinema. During the ensuing ...

Cofralandes, Chilean Rhapsody (2002)

An experimental four-part 2002 Franco-Chilean digital video series written and directed by Raúl Ruiz. The first part won a FIPRESCI Award at the Montreal World Film Festival in 2002 "for the director's personal exploration into his homeland, using DV in a ...

The Solitudes (1992)

"At that time (late 1992), I made a film for British television, Channel 4, called Las Soledades, the name of a long poem by Góngora. It was made in Chile, using many poetic elements of the country. Chile is seen through the eyes of a Chinese painter—a ...

Three Crowns of the Sailor (1991)

Shortly after murdering his professor, a young man encounters a sailor who offers him a position on his ship in exchange for 3 Danish crowns and his attention as he recounts his life story. ...

Palombella rossa (1989)

Michele is an MP for the Italian Communist Party who loses his memory in a car crash, though hardly anyone around him seems to notice. During a crucial water polo match on the eve of election day, he gradually begins to remember his past life, revealing a ...

Dog's Dialogue (1987)

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

The Castaways of Liguria (1985)

A fire started by Harry Thompson destroys the Liguria, a legendary ship of the 19th century, and its treasure of gold and diamonds sinks in the sea. Thompson manages to escape unaware that Albizetti sleeps in the same lifeboat he uses. They manage to arri ...

Screen Pioneers No:3 Raul Ruiz (1985)

This eccentric short directed by Keith Griffiths, outlines Ruiz's work, biography and preoccupations and includes a rare interview with the director. ...

7 False Connections (1984)

Short film showing cinematographer Henri Alekan, director Raúl Ruiz and actress Olimpia Carlisi at work creating sublime visual effects of the sort seen in City of Pirates. ...

Claves, 1: How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1984)

Documentary in four parts on Latin American cinema. First episode: the influences of Cahiers du cinéma, the New Wave, Italian neorealism. In Brazil, Cinema Novo draws inspiration from these models while drawing on the historical and cultural singularity o ...

Claves, 3: Small mother country, great mother country (1984)

Documentary in four parts on Latin American cinema. Third episode: from the 1960s, France and Europe showed a real enthusiasm for Latin American cinema, but the latter remained hampered by numerous economic and political obstacles. ...

Cinématon XXIII (1982)

Reel 23 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series. ...

Cinématon n°228 : Raoul Ruiz (1982)

Portrait of "cinéaste" Ruiz, seemingly at his typewriter, in Courant's ongoing "Cinématon" series. ...

The Sorceror's Apprentice (1977)

A thriller in which the characters are Latin-American exiles living in Paris. ...

Chuquiago (1977)

Racial, social and cultural aspects of La Paz (called Chuquiago by the Aymaras) seen through four stories. ...

La Victoria (1973)

The young Marcela leaves her small Chilean village and travels to Santiago in order to find work as a secretary. ...