Life Is a Dream (1986)

Original title

Mémoire des apparences

Directed by

Raúl Ruiz

Genre

drama film, fantasy film

Country

France

Runtime

1h 43m

Rating

7.6 of 10 from 7 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A man returns to his homeland under a dictatorship and becomes tangled in dreams, memories, and old movie fragments. The film mixes history, a classic Spanish play, and cheap old serials to create a puzzle about exile and the nature of reality.

dreamlikesurrealcerebralunsettlingpastichemetafictionalslow-burnphilosophical

What happens

Life is a Dream (French: Mémoire des apparences) is a 1986 French surrealist art film written and directed by Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz. It is an oneiric, metafictional, "neo-Baroque" work about the Chilean dictatorship, exile, dream, cinema and mnemonics. It was inspired by Frances A. Yates' book The Art of Memory (1966) and features characters and scenes from Life Is a Dream (1635), a Spanish Golden Age play Ruiz had directed at the Avignon Festival in 1986, in addition to pastiches of B-movies and serials of the 1930s and 1940s. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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