Underplayed Gems

City of Pirates (1983)

City of Pirates poster
Original title
La Ville des pirates
Directed by
Raúl Ruiz
Genre
drama film, fantasy film
Country
France, Portugal
Runtime
1h 51m
Rating
7.1 of 10 from 44 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
The 3D catalogue: film cases on wooden shelves, with the cat sitting at the counter next to its greeting.

The catalogue in 3D

The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this film is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.

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How it feels

A young woman encounters strange characters and bizarre events on a remote island. The story follows her through a series of dreamlike episodes involving pirates, a boy, and a mysterious man.

dreamlikesurrealdisorientingdarkexperimentalunsettlingwhimsicalvisually inventive

What happens

City Of Pirates (French: La Ville Des Pirates) is a 1983 French experimental surrealist dark fantasy film directed by Raúl Ruiz. Made during Ruiz's most prolific period of filmmaking in exile and shortly after his first return to Chile since the 1973 military coup, the film stars a primarily French cast including Hugues Quester, Anne Alvaro and Melvil Poupaud. It was filmed in Portugal over a period of three weeks. Ruiz used a process of automatic writing to write his screenplay during the shoot. Academic Michael Goddard notes that "Ruiz would write the script each day immediately after the siesta; hence, in effect, dream the script rather than writing it." As a result, the film is heavily influenced by conceptions of dreams and their relationship to storytelling and the visual. The film is generally considered to be one of Ruiz's best works and exemplifies several recurring themes and motifs of the director's style, including neo-Baroque narrative and cinematography, depth of field, childhood, navigation, dreams, and schizophrenia. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

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