RETROSPECTIVE: RAÚL RUIZ

“It’s better to get lost than to find oneself,” Raúl Ruiz used to reply to viewers who complained about getting lost while watching one of his films. An unclassifiable filmmaker, a poet of detours, false leads, and stories that resist closure, his filmography —more than a hundred titles shot around the world, between exile and adventure— stands among the most radical, free, and fascinating in modern cinema. An imaginary geography populated by doubles, language games, conspiracies, stolen images, enchanted objects, and figures that dissolve. A cinema made of folds and traps, where dream logic coexists with the precision of a baroque gesture.

This retrospective follows his many phases, from his experimental beginnings in Chile (Tres tristes tigres, El realismo socialista) to his grand European works of maturity (Le temps retrouvé, Mysteries of Lisbon), passing through clandestine, playful, and ghostly films (The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, Treasure Island, La recta provincia). Throughout the series, we encounter a Ruiz who never stops transforming himself, reinventing the rules of storytelling, multiplying the secret doors within the image.

Program in collaboration with the Embassy of Chile.