A Man, When He Is a Man

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.

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

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.

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 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.

A butcher whose meat is most tender, surrounded successively by ephemeral and delightful cashiers.

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.

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.

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".

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.)

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.

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

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, somnambulating through a life that is unreal by comparison. It is the belief of the Philokinetes that film has an existence “independent from humans. Cinema, they said, is the primeval soup of a new life form. There from were to emerge pure screening creatures. Which is to say, non-topical beings.” - n+1

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.