Raúl Ruiz — Director (41)

Movie

Snakes and Ladders (1980)
Zig~Zag - le jeu de l'oie (Une fiction didactique à propos de la cartographie) WikiData IMDb TMDB
Raúl Ruiz actor: Pascal Bonitzer / Jean-Loup Rivière
other title: Il gioco dell'oca / Zig~Zag - le jeu de l'oie (Une fiction didactique à propos de la cartographie) …
A man awakens to find himself immersed in a real-life scenario of a board game with an ever expanding cartography.

Movie

The Penal Colony (1970)
La colonia penal WikiData IMDb TMDB
Raúl Ruiz actor: Mónica Echeverría / Luis Alarcón …
other title: La Colonie pénitentiaire / La colonia penal
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 structures, the inhabitants--who speak a strange dialect composed of Spanish and English--still obey the old prison rules. After sending back detailed accounts of the torture and repression seen everywhere, the journalist realizes that she has fallen into the trap created for her by the islanders: lacking natural resources, the island's main export is news.

Movie

The Insomniac on the Bridge (1985)
L'Éveillé du pont de l'Alma WikiData IMDb TMDB
Raúl Ruiz actor: Melvil Poupaud / Michael Lonsdale …
other title: L'Éveillé du pont de l'Alma / L'éveillé du pont de l'Alma
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.

Movie

Manoel’s Destinies (1984)
Manoel dans l’île des merveilles WikiData IMDb TMDB
Raúl Ruiz actor: Ruben de Freitas / Teresa Madruga …
other title: Manoel dans l’île des merveilles / Manoel's Destinies …
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 garden, revealing that fate can have several twists and turns in one's life, depending on decisions that are made early on.

Movie

Régime sans pain (1985)
Régime sans pain WikiData IMDb TMDB
Raúl Ruiz actor: Anne Alvaro / Olivier Angèle …
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 music videos rather than one; once this deal was made, he shot enough material to interconnect the various videos until he arrived at a feature.

Movie

Love Torn in a Dream (2000)
Combat d'amour en songe WikiData IMDb TMDB
other title: Pugna d’amore in sogno / Combate de Amor em Sonho …
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 convent. These rather ironic paradoxes turn this fairytale into a philosophical fable.

Movie

Of Great Events and Ordinary People (1980)
De grands événements et des gens ordinaires IMDb TMDB
other title: De grands événements et des gens ordinaires
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 to make a documentary about nothing except itself – a film whose central subject is forever lost in digression and ‘dispersal’, harking back to his Chilean experiments of the ‘60s. Its political content is deliberately left negligible: it’s hard to tell at the end who did actually win the election, let alone why.

Movie

The Solitudes (1992)
Las soledades IMDb TMDB
other title: Las soledades
"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 painter who uses the traditional 18th-century concepts of Shih-Tao. Once again, I am doing something that, apparently, is not meant to go hand in hand. The landscape of my country, southern Chile, where I was born, initially provokes in me a feeling of fear. The landscape is madness. In these crazy landscapes, you can find very reasonable people, which makes the landscape seem even crazier."

Movie

The Golden Boat (1991)
The Golden Boat WikiData IMDb TMDB
Raúl Ruiz actor: Michael Kirby / Federico Muchnik …
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. In the course of their adventures, Austin pursues his object of desire - a Mexican soap opera star - and along the way engages a host of TV characters and bit players, whose repartee range from gangsterish insults to the question of God's existence.

Movie

The Territory (1981)
O Território WikiData IMDb TMDB
Raúl Ruiz actor: Geoffrey Carey / Paul Getty Jr. …
other title: O Território / Le Territoire
A small group of well-to-do vacationers go on a hiking trip into the woods just to find themselves mysteriously lost.

Movie

Dog's Dialogue (1987)
Colloque de chiens
Raúl Ruiz actor: Eva Simonet / Robert Darmel …
other title: Colloque de chiens / 狗的对话
A charming tale of murder, perversity and narrative echoes told through shots of barking dogs and a La jetée-like series of stills.

Movie

Voyage of a Hand (1984)
Voyage d'une main IMDb TMDB
Raúl Ruiz actor: Franck Oger / Nadège Clair …
other title: Voyage d'une main
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 empty of sense or direction. In any case, it will be difficult to deny the acid sense of humor that animates the film.

Movie

Mysteries of Lisbon (2010)
Mistérios de Lisboa WikiData IMDb TMDB NeoDB
Raúl Ruiz actor: Adriano Luz / Maria João Bastos …
other title: Mistérios de Lisboa / Misterios de Lisboa …
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.

Movie

City of Pirates (1984)
La Ville des pirates
Raúl Ruiz actor: Hugues Quester / Anne Alvaro …
other title: La villa dei pirati / A Cidade dos Piratas …
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.

Movie

The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978)
L’hypothèse du tableau volé IMDb TMDB Douban NeoDB
Raúl Ruiz actor: Jean Rougeul / Gabriel Gascon …
other title: L’hypothèse du tableau volé / 被窃油画的假设 …
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.

Movie

Life Is a Dream (1987)
Mémoire des apparences
Raúl Ruiz actor: Sylvain Thirolle / Roch Leibovici …
other title: Mémoire des apparences
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.