Raoul Ruiz

A satirical reading of the process of the "Unidad Popular" of President Salvador Allende, prior to the military civic coup of 1973 in Chile. The film is a choral story, where different worlds are chained together. (imdb)

The story of a man whose wife has committed suicide and appears to him as a ghost, following him everywhere and changing his personality. Unfinished in 1967 and completed by Valeria Sarmiento for a 2020 premiere. (imdb)

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. There are four audiovisual provinces, and the threat of war is felt among the factions. The political and economic problems are immersed in a fictional jelly divided into evening episodes.

An old man, awaiting death, wanders about a dream city reliving scenes from his youth. (mubi.com)

Why it is so difficult to count fish in an aquarium? Ruiz, his loyal actor Melvil Poupaud and his producer François Margolin come up with a wide range of hypotheses. With their bone-dry wit, they keep up the tradition of the French pataphysics: the science of imaginary solutions. (IFFR)

A couple win a big house in a gamble, When they get there, don1t find it empty but full of ghosts of the last inhabitants

Tv Series about Chile folk and myths. The tale of a mother and her son who begin the hunt of a famous christian bones. (es.wikipedia.org)

Gustav Klimt's eternal search for perfection, eroticism and love are examined in this film, which centers on his passion for Lea de Castro, his struggle for artistic freedom, and his life-long but platonic relationship with Emilie Floge. (Outsider Pictures)

Max retains a lifelong vision of his hero, a French aviator named Antoine, who keeps finding himself behind the controls of an airplane without remembering how to operate it - and who is also, in some way, the hero of the classic French novel Les Grandes Meaulnes. (filmlinc.org)

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. (imdb)

A father (Michel Piccoli) is scheming to have his slightly mental daughter from an earlier marriage (Elsa Zylberstein) killed by allowing a murderous psychopath (Bernard Giraudeau) to be released from the asylum and led to his house. However, the psychopath and the daughter fall for each other. (imdb)

A prelude announces the intent to tell nine stories, all marked with letters of alphabet, with the subsequent permutations of these stories. Not only the plotlines get mutated and re-ordered, so do the actors, hats, beards, accents, manners - whatever may identify a character ceases to be such an identifier. The plot itself becomes a mystery, since there are parallel searches for the treasure, the map of treasure, which as we learn is a treasure in itself, a coin, a kidnapped father etc.

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) is on his deathbed. Looking at photographs brings memories of his childhood, his youth, his lovers, and the way the Great War put an end to a stratum of society. His memories are in no particular order, they move back and forth in time. Marcel at various ages interacts with Odette, with the beautiful Gilberte and her doomed husband, with the pleasure-seeking Baron de Charlus, with Marcel's lover Albertine, and with others... (imdb)

The story of a cult, obsessed with an everlasting film.

At her son's funeral, Solange, a lawyer famous for losing hopeless cases, agrees to defend René, her son's age, accused of murdering his wealthy aunt, Jeanne, who's part of the Franco-Belgian Psychoanalytic Society, known for odd views and methods. She reads Jeanne's journal, documenting René's criminal tendencies. Solange believes him innocent, manipulated into the murder or framed... (IMDB)

Take a walk into the weird world of filmmaker Raul Ruiz as he takes us to Paris for a twisted ride. A man which shares four names and four personalities (which is the real one?) is the link between four different, yet similar, stories involving love, lust, crime, and time. (imdb)

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

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 taken her own life. What share of responsibility does Pierre hold in this situation?

Come to the Village of the Dogs, it's easy to find. Just follow the avenue of crutches and the prosthetic legs hanging from the trees. It's where the Virgin Mary keeps appearing in the sky. And the local Marquis' hobby is burying people alive, sometimes rescued by Ellic. Sometimes not! (imdb)

Chile is seen through the eyes of a Chinese painter – a traditional painter who uses the concepts of XVIII century Shih-T'ao. (letterboxd.com)

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. Instead of seeing a physician about it, he accepted the fact and began studying and interviewing his own hallucinations, like an anthropologist. He was convinced that people in hell are happy, because you find what you want there. (letterboxd.com

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 assassin, as he joins up with a young rock critic and philosophy student named Israel Williams.

A 1987 adaptation of an Arthur Adamov play in which all eleven actors rotate their parts.

A baroque mix of revolutionary politics, pop culture, and semiotics, loosely based on the play by Pedro Calderon de la Barca (imdb)

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

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 alongside the Seine, a crime made all the worse because she is pregnant. The rest of this slow-paced film deals with the consequences of that action.

In a world where cities have become car-graveyards and transport is achieved via bicycles equipped with sails, a princely ruler loses his power due to bad TV ratings, he is depersonalized by a machine run by an evil Professor Pie, and is threatened with ritualized death by car accident. He seeks his personality, a lovestruck wheelchair-bound woman convincing the Professor to help. (The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre)

Robert Louis Stevenson's novel, updated to the twentieth century.

Shot with damaged stock and wearing its shoddiness like a crown, the film oscillates between half a dozen languages, mainly atonal English and monotonal French, and drives one slightly batty with its portentous central gambling metaphor (poker games between three variously bandaged men), its seemingly irrelevant jazz drums on the sound track, and the capacity of each line reading to make the petulant dialogue sound even less likely than it reads. (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

Odd "fictional documentary" about the Avignon Festival. (Mubi)

A 'double-bill' of two discrete narratives, concerning a cherubic infant killer and a neurotic Norman Bates-like loner: when, as the second plot develops, one has all but forgotten the first, it brusquely resurfaces. (filmlinc.com)

The film develops into a series of very theatrical sequences which will tell the "story" of a man and his left hand.

A lush, baroque adaptation of Jean Racine's 1670 tragedy about a Roman emperor who bends to popular will and declines to marry the Palestinian queen he loves. (imdb)

Based on the southern Chilean island of Chiloé's myth of "Caleuche", or The Ship of the Dead. (imdb)

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 therefore means everything. (imdb)

Several hikers become lost in the woods.

'A didactical fiction about cartography'. This "cine-cartographic" essay navigates between the documentary and the fiction, the map and the territory, the dream and the reality. (spacefiction.wordpress.com)

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 series' significance. (imdb)

A cinéma vérité documentary about the elections in Paris which reflexively inverts in on itself. (imdb)

An examination of the patriarchal Jesuits and the matriarchal partisans of the cult of the Virgin Mary (library.aftrs.edu.au)

A 21-minute, César-winning short film from Chilean expatriate director Raul Ruiz, Colloque de Chiens (in English, Dog's Dialogue) takes its title from a series of barking dogs who reappear throughout the film, one of several motifs used to add unexpected depth to a purposefully melodramatic narrative. The film begins by centering on Monique, a young woman who descends into the world of prostitution...

The search of a fragmented body and the encounter with the political utopia. (Filmaffinity)

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

An Agronom arrives at a farm to expropriate land, but the landowner is willing to leave the country voluntarily. A revolt among the tenants occur. (imdb)

Ruiz deconstructs, satirizes and politicizes a rich-boy/poor-girl romance bestseller which had been dubbed 'the Chilean "Love Story"'. (imdb)

An adaptation of the Kafka story updated to the modern day.

The drunken nights of several listless chancers in Chile's capital city build inexorably to violence. (imdb)

Absurdist short about a man with a suitcase and a man inside that suitcase. (imdb)