La Femme au foyer

The One-Eyed 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.

Dans un miroir

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

Of Great Events and Ordinary People

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 Solitudes

"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."

Boucherie fine

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

Les Minutes d'un faiseur de film

A short personal filmed journal about the director's nervousness in presenting a script and awaiting the decision about whether it can be made.

Mysteries of Lisbon

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.

The Lost Domain

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.

Brise-glace

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

The Suspended Vocation

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.

Genealogies of a Crime

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

Mysteries of Lisbon

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.)

Treasure Island

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.

Nucingen House

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

The Film to Come

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

Brise-Glace: Histoires de glace

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