Raúl Ruiz

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

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.

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

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.

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'.

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.

Raúl Ruiz is a master in evoking surreal dream worlds and does so with verve in this film too.

Religious travelogue by surrealist master Ruiz shot on Sicily.

Alienating concoction of South-American surrealism and the 'classic' Hollywood thriller genre.

Marcello Mastroianni played no less than four roles in his last feature, an accessible and enjoyable tale by Raul Ruiz.

Strange sect studies film fragment that is stolen.

Latest Ruiz was inspired by a bizarre anecdote from psychoanalysis. An incomparable courtroom drama with Cathérine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli.

Against the background of elegant apartments, chic restaurants and tropical surroundings Ruiz plays with cinematographic conventions, psychology and a large dose of 'suspension of disbelief' in his first American feature.

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.

Ruiz on inventive top form, including narrative games about making a feature about pirates; old religious opinions; retired nuns who run a brothel.

Raúl Ruiz spent three years following the life of the French painter Jean Miotte, well-known to connoisseurs, in his various studios. In the resulting documentary Ruiz' camera observes the work of the painter, but also takes part.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

New and against enchanting film by former Film Maker in Focus, Raúl Ruiz, who returned for this film to his homeland Chile. Two men in a bar talk about their lives as if they were dead. True or false?

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.

A virtuoso homage to an artist and his life, the film is set against the rich historical tapestry of the fin de siècle. Screening of the director's version.

Raúl Ruiz' version of the age-old vampire theme. The new French owners take possession of their elegant Chilean mansion. The old servant is also taken over, but he behave strangely. An absurdist fairytale, freely based on Balzac.

Comedy written by Raúl Ruiz about several Chileans who cannot hide their all too human sides forever. When a certain El Traitor returns to Paris from Chile, it's high time to bring back memories of dangerous times when revolutionary ideas vied with amorous feelings.

Breathtaking film version of the classic Portuguese novel by Camilo Carlos Branco. Lisbon in the 19th century: a boy discovers the secret of his aristocratic roots and a French heiress takes revenge on her husband. A spiral of stories, in which nothing and no-one is what it seems.

In one of his very last projects, Raul Ruiz celebrates the films of his historical predecessor Jean Painlevé, a documentary innovator whose work always blended science with surrealism. Ruiz and friends further perfect the art of mystification. Screened together with La maleta.

Ruiz started his film career with an almost literal mise-en-abyme story: a man carries another man in his suitcase. When tired, they switch roles. Screened before Ballet aquatique.

Last film directed by Ruiz, the most screened director in the history of the Rotterdam Film Festival. A farewell letter from a free-associating, intensely lucid rascal. What story there is, is about a retired Chilean who’s waiting for his murderer.

Five pesos and a cup of coffee on a table top. Raúl Ruiz gets the most from this minimal set-up, both visually and through the laconic soundtrack.

One of the most emblematic films by the master concerns a holy fragment of celluloid that can only be seen by a secret society known as the Philokinetes.

Ruiz, who passed away in 2011, posthumously delights with his 121st film, shot in 1990 and completed by his widow Sarmiento – a hilarious, absurdist, satirical commentary (in the form of a seven-part soap opera) on the political-social landscape he found upon returning to Catholic-capitalist Chile after years of exile.