Diálogo de exiliados (1974) Raoul Ruiz

Raoul Ruiz left Chile a month after the coup d’état of September 1973. After passing through Berlin, he arrived in Paris in February 1974 and met a Brazilian cinematographer, Gilberto Azevedo, who convinced him that he will be able to work there in better conditions than in Germany. Ruiz therefore decides to stay. The following month, with his incredible speed, he shot Dialogue of Exiles (Diálogo de exiliados), a film between fiction and documentary whose protagonists – activists of the Chilean left who had just arrived, some of them even before their appearance in the film – find themselves thrown into an unknown land, torn between their desire to immediately organize resistance from exile (find support, raise funds) and the elementary constraints of daily life (find where to sleep, learn French). With Brecht’s Dialogues of Exiles in mind, Ruiz, guided by a very personal conception of the intervention film, invents during the filming a kind of dialectical sitcom, filled with Chilean idiosyncrasies - going so far as to include the kidnapping in the story. by excess of hospitality” of a singing star with pinochettist sympathies. The result, tinged with fatalism and an irony which could have been saving, in fact passes for an act of political treason and earns its author the threat of serious trouble. Ruiz then detached himself from militant commitment and, speaking of his film, summed up philosophically: “I wanted to make it for, and it came out against. » Nicolas Le Thierry d’Ennequin