Raúl Ruiz

Raúl Ernesto Ruiz Pino was an experimental Chilean filmmaker, writer and teacher whose work is best known in France. He directed more than 100 films. Ruiz spent some years at the Catholic University of Santa Fe, Argentina's cinema school. Back in Chile, he directed his first feature film Tres Tristes Tigres in the late 1960s, winning the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival. He was something of an outsider among the politically oriented filmmakers of his generation, such as Miguel Littín and Helvio Soto, his work being far more ironic, surrealistic, and experimental. In 1973, after the coup d'état led by the dictator Augusto Pinochet, he left Chile and settled in France. After several years producing and directing low-budget telefilms, he began working with larger budgets and stars in 1996 with Three Lives and Only One Death. The following year he directed Genealogies of a Crime, starring Catherine Deneuve. John Malkovich starred in Le temps retrouvé, Les Âmes fortes and Klimt. Ruiz died in August 2011 as a result of complications from a lung infection, He was 72. His final completed feature, Night Across the Street (2012), was selected to be screened posthumously in the Directors' Fortnight section of the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.