Dias de campo

Dias de campo is Raúl Ruiz’ first Chilean film since 1973, the year in which he fled from his fatherland. He had returned before, but it was only on his recent visits to Chile that ideas reemerged for a Chilean film. The film is also inspired by the work of the Chilean writer Federico Gana.Somewhere in a bar in Santiago de Chile, two old men are drinking and talking. One of the two, Don Federico, plays with his glass of wine and seems to be writing a novel. There is a strange mood and the men have a bizarre conversation: they talk with eachother as if they were both dead. Where are we? In the realm of the dead? On the contrary. We are in a previous life, a memory, because Don Federico brings his childhood in the countryside back to life.What started as a film version of a novel by Federico Gana that Ruiz had read at school at the age of eight, has emerged via a mixture of two of Gana’s novels into a film about the memories that reading these books left with the young Ruiz, and with Ruiz now. In other words: a new collection of Ruizian elements from the incomparable brain of the Chilean magician. (SdH)