IFFR 2004

Raúl Ruiz

Unusually lyrical Ruiz film about an impossible encounter, impossible harmony: a tragedy of closed doors. Based on the play by Racine.

Raul Ruiz focus

Bérénice

Black comedy about money, death and false spirituality that brings together an unlikely romantic couple: a spoilt society girl and a serial killer who has escaped from jail and has been hired to kill her.

Ce jour-là

In all respects an imaginative film by Ruiz. His adaptation of an Iranian novel and a Spanish play is a mixture of dream and reality, past and present. Unusual in its colour effects and the subtitling: often of what is not said.

La chouette aveugle

Characters and plot of a melodrama are reduced to rudimentary attributes in combination with three sorts of material: shots of barking dogs, streets and other locations and a story told off-screen.

Colloque de chiens

Shot in Rotterdam, this stunning stream of visual, verbal and conceptual ideas looks at the difficult position of an anthropologist who tries to learn the language of an obscure Patagonian Indian tribe after finding its last remaining survivors.

Het dak van de walvis

Ruiz takes the mickey out of the form of the television report, exaggerating the conventions and clichés, and then he lets the film run off the rails with surreal digressions.

Des grands événements et des gens ordinaires: les élections

Detective structured like an unfolding puzzle draws on art history for clues. It is also a playful parody on French art connoisseurs.

L'hypothèse du tableau volé

Ten years after the coup in Chile, Ruiz looks back at his past, with the eyes of someone who lives in exile. And via another world: that of cinema. A survivor returns to the land of the dead and comes across his doppelgangers and phantom friends.

Lettre d'un cineaste

A dance performance choreographed by Jean-Claude Gallotta forms the basis for an intoxicating dance film that, according to Ruiz, is 'about doubt, fully-fledged doubt'.

Mammame

A literature teacher has to learn off by heart the names of 15 thousand members of the resistance against the Chilean junta and to do so he uses a seventeenth century Spanish play. Ruiz adapted this and turned it into a playful experimental film in which dream and reality become entangled with each other.

Mémoire des apparences

Philosophical film-noir caricature, inspired by gangster films and detective stories from the 1950s. A translator of pulp fiction is asked to write a biography of a crook who alleges he is involved with several unsolved murders of young blonde models.

Une place parmi les vivants

Actor Franck Oger is a spectator for the play in which he also performs in this ingenious film that Ruiz made during the Avignon Festival in 1983.

La présence réelle

In 1989, Raul Ruiz worked on a homage to Hubert Bals, who died a year earlier. He was played beautifully by Jean Badin. Hubert smokes and says he is busy and can't be disturbed. Never competed at the time and now the rediscovered film material can be seen. UNIQUE.

Responso

Ruiz' introduction to the long work Cofralandes, about a fictional land that is a dreamed up version of his birthplace Chile. Seen through the eyes of three travellers, a Frenchman, a German and a Briton. With mystery, humour, intellectual reflections, science, nostalgia and poetry.

Rhapsodie chilienne

Film version of Marcel Proust's magnum opus. His reminiscences of decadent society life in nineteenth-century Paris mingle into the fictional reality of his literary work. An associative, fragmented and comic mosaic that does justice to the spirit of Proust.

Le temps retrouvé

Early Ruiz film from the time when he still lived in Chile, based on a melodramatic play about a man who pimps for his sister, is largely a sketch of a social environment.

Tres tristes tigres

Orson Welles meets Hans Christian Andersen, Edgar Allan Poe and others in Ruiz' first major commercial success in his new home of France.

Les trois couronnes du matelot

Starting from the question of what happens if we have to pass judgement, Ruiz undertakes a breathtaking and amusing filmic adventure, larded with villainous humour.

La vertige de la page blanche

Surrealist Ruiz film with echoes of Buñuel's L'Age d'Or. The pirate city is a ghost castle on a rocky island, in which a group of roaming souls is involved with gruesome sex and cannibalism.

La ville des pirates

Ruis allows the West, China and the Arab world to start conversing with each other and they emerge in an insoluble dispute.

IFFR 2025
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025