Raúl Ruiz, last year one of the Film Makers in Focus, was working in 1989 on an homage to festival founder and director Hubert Bals, who had just died. The film was never completed and was lost for years, but recently turned up in New York and screened at the festival in 2004. In the introduction to this 60-minute work-in-progress, Ruiz said that he wanted to shape his mourning of Bals in a film that shows that ‘dying means nothing’. In this way, Hubert (strikingly reincarnated in Jean Badin, a regular actor with Ruiz) in Responso has conversations with his eyes shut, in a comic state between wake, sleep, meditation and death. He listens to several directors who have a new film in mind, smokes and says he is busy and can’t be disturbed. Responso is an essay about the two central motors in the work of Ruiz: telling stories (the film presents a whole procession of storytellers/directors and their stories, of whom a Sicilian re-enacting a fight is the most spectacular) and the allegorical way in which he averts death. In the meantime, Ruiz has edited the film to feature length, although it is still not finished, according to the master himself. (SdH)
