Cinema Guild has announced the U.S. theatrical release of Night Across the Street (La noche de enfrente, pictured), the final film in the sprawling filmography of over 100 films by the late celebrated Chilean director Raúl Ruiz, an iconoclastic director who became one of the world's most distinctive filmmakers.
Lauded by critics for his surrealism and highly imaginative approach to narrative and visual style (defined by unconventional angles, close-ups and innovative use of color), the great Raúl Ruiz died of a lung infection in Paris on the 19th of August 2011.
On the verge of force retirement, Don Celso, an elderly office worker begins to relive both real and imagined memories from his life- a trip to the movies as a young boy with Beethoven, listening to tall tales from long John Silver, a brief stay in a haunted hotel, conversations with a fictional doppelganger of a real writer. Stories hide within stories and the thin line between imagination and reality steadily erodes, opening up a marvelous new world of personal remembrance and fantastic melodrama. In this playfully elegiac film loosely adapted from the fantastical short stories of Chilean writer Hernán del Solar, Ruiz has crafted a final masterwork on his favorite subjects: fiction, history and life itself.
Shot between March and April 2011 in Santiago de Chile, Night Across the Street is a mysterious testament, the true meaning of which was not understood even by those who worked with him on the shoot. Ruiz conceived this film to be seen only after his death, a death which he knew was not far off.
The film, which premiered posthumously at the Cannes Directors' Fortnight last May and has been an official selection at the Toronto, New York and Chicago Film Festivals, among others, opens for an exclusive theatrical engagement on Friday, February 8 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center.
