Life Is a Dream

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.

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

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.

This three part French TV serial for children (alternate versions exist as a feature, Manoel’s Destinies, and a 4 part Portuguese TV serial, Adventure in Madeira) is the favourite of many devotees of Raúl Ruiz. This is because it ties the enchantment and mystery of Lewis Carroll, Carlo Collodi and the Brothers Grimm to the filmmaker’s experiments with narrative strategies and what he calls the pentaludic model of storytelling (where characters are thrown dice-like into combinations and situations governed by the play of Chance and Destiny).

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 man whose personal and political identity crisis mirrors that of Italian communism itself.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 arguments that plagued Latin American left-wing political parties.

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

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 convulsed Europe of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. (A longer television version of the film of the same name, released in 2010.)

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.

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 of their chosen artform in the early 21st century.

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.