Chile

The stories come in layers. There’s the one narrated at the start, about the joyful community of Germans living in dignity in the south of Chile. It may be set to wholesome archive footage of mountains and rosy cheeks, but even the narrator mentions the rumours, the other, less savoury tales that also circulate. There’s the story that appears as text on the screen, of a girl from the colony, Maria, who fled into the forest to avoid punishment, it in turn involves three little pigs and a big bad wolf. Then there’s the narrative that takes up the bulk of the film, the story of what happens once Maria enters the house she finds in the woods, rendered in intricate, mesmerising stop motion animation.Read More »

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A crisis counselor is sent by the Catholic Church to a small Chilean beach town where disgraced priests and nuns, suspected of crimes ranging from child abuse to baby-snatching from unwed mothers, live secluded, after an incident occurs.Read More »

Lucia is a young woman who works as a seamstress in a factory and lives with her father in an old house in Santiago, Chile. The film occurs in December 2006 during the weeks that take place from the ex-dictator Pinochet’s funeral to Christmas. Through the simple observation of Lucia’s daily life, the spectator is allowed access into a hidden and neglected world of a generation of Chileans striving to recover from the military dictatorship.Read More »

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A foreign journalist arrives on a small Pacific island 200 miles off the coast of South America. Once a leper colony, the island was later transformed into a prison and then, under U.N. mandate, made into an independent republic. Yet despite democratic structures, the inhabitants–who speak a strange dialect composed of Spanish and English–still obey the old prison rules. After sending back detailed accounts of the torture and repression seen everywhere, the journalist realizes that she”s fallen into the trap created for her by the islanders: lacking natural resources, the island”s main export is news. The clearest anticipation of Ruiz”s later European work, The Penal Colony is a powerful document of the tensions and contradictions in Chile in the months before Allende”s electoral victory.Read More »

This is the fourth in a series of seven projected video essays (four of which were completed) that Ruiz was commissioned to make in 2002-2003 for use among Chilean community organizations and broadcast on public television. Cofralandes, the head-title for each of the segments of Ruiz’s series, is taken from a song by Violeta Parra where it evokes the “land of milk and honey,” the “land of Cockayne,” the “green world” imagined by Gonzalo in The Tempest.Read More »

This is the second in a series of seven projected video essays that Ruiz was commissioned to make in 2002-2003 for use among Chilean community organizations and broadcast on public television. Cofralandes, the head-title for each of the segments of Ruiz’s series, is taken from a song by Violeta Parra where it evokes the “land of milk and honey,” the “land of Cockayne,” the “green world” imagined by Gonzalo in The Tempest.Read More »

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For more than twenty years the films of Ruiz have led us into the fields of uninhibited delirium, free associations, and intricate games of collage. Ruiz, paying no heed to conventions, leads his audience into a labyrinth without a map, without warning and without an Ariadne allowed to help them retrace their steps. “Regulars only” seems to be the imperative which thrusts us into his creative world. However, it is a playful attitude that he proposes. Labyrinth, yes, but devouring monster, no — except the one we assemble ourselves from the fragments of mirrors that Ruiz has left scattered on the road. These fragments, their selection and random order, is indeed the art of Ruiz.Read More »

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Ruiz is no lover of documentary. But the opportunity to make an essay-film offering his ‘observations of Chile’ produced in him a mammoth work, recently shown in seven parts on Chilean television. Shooting with a digital camera, Ruiz refinds the mobility and mercuriality of his early Chilean work. But he is also able to explore anew the transmutation of reality into fiction: Chile becomes the imaginary country of Cofralandes, ‘a popular version of paradise, a folkloric paradise. In the beginning there is a song about a place where poor people can live without poverty, and they can eat everything – even the houses. The rivers are made of wine.’Read More »

A working class man who, tired of being the victim of criminals, decides to take justice in his own hands.Read More »