May 3rd: CITY OF PIRATES (Raúl Ruiz, 1983)

A housemaid embarks on an adventure with a young boy who may have killed his own family.

Raúl Ruiz was a Chilean-born filmmaker who fled his native country after the 1973 coup d'état which put General Augusto Pinochet in power. Settling in France and making films around Europe, Ruiz completed over 100 films from the mid 1960's until his death in 2011, and is regarded as one of cinema's great surrealists.

Originally preparing to adapt a French young adult adventure novel, Ruiz discovered that another company had secured the rights and was moving into production. He redirected the fruits of his research to a new project conceived after his first return to Chile since his exile and seeing society under the dictatorship. While the film is not overtly political, Ruiz included stories of local atrocities and fused them mythological and literary allusions as well as his own dreams, doing most of the writing on set after waking from sleep. The director has also described the film as a "free adaptation of Peter Pan".

The film was shot on location on Baleal Island off the coast of Portugal, but in the French language. Behind the camera was Portuguese cinematographer Acácio de Almeida, and a second unit was assigned to exclusively shoot landscapes at various times of day, often filming through painted glass to achieve an otherworldly effect. Because there was no completed script when production began with new scenes written daily, Ruiz encouraged camaraderie among the cast and crew with game playing and group barbecues.

In his screen debut at age 9 was Melvil Poupad (Laurence Anyways), who would continue to work with Ruiz over the next few decades. Also starring are French actors Anne Alvaro (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) and Hugues Quester (Three Colors: Blue). The film was edited by Ruiz's wife Valeria Sarmiento, and another longtime Ruiz collaborator Jorge Arriagada composed the musical score, which alternates between stretches of Morricone-like sublimity and heightened suspense reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann's work for Alfred Hitchcock.

Ruiz's visual style blends the baroque, deep-focus compositions of Orson Welles with the humor and absurdity found in the early cinematic works of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. While his films were not widely-seen in America, by the 1990s he had a considerable amount of clout in France and was working with veteran actors like Catherine Deneuve, Michel Piccoli, John Malkovich, Isabelle Huppert, and Marcello Mastroianni.

Running time is approx. 110 minutes.