Film at Lincoln Center has announced the U.S. exclusive virtual theatrical release of Raúl Ruiz’s complete miniseries Mysteries of Lisbon, opening Friday, May 22 and released by Chicago-based distribution company Music Box Films.
Arguably Chile's most internationally-renowned and prolific filmmaker, Ruiz took such delight in the form of plots — the texture of their exposition; the tricks they employed to introduce characters; the jolt their twists could give—that he sometimes mischievously pushed them into incoherence, piling on characters and revelations and backstories and reversals until the plot became a kind of abstract field of information without a clear sequence or plan.
In Mysteries of Lisbon, his tremendous adaptation of a novel by the 19th-century Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco, he has the space to tell a story of breathtaking complexity that nonetheless keeps its shape. It starts with the reunion of a supposedly orphaned boy with his estranged mother and from there, expands into an epic, densely peopled story of deception, intrigue, murder, elopement, and disguise, all set against the backdrop of Portugal’s 1820 revolution. Winner of the prestigious Louis Delluc Prize, Film at Lincoln Center is pleased to present the original six-hour mini-series with footage never before seen in the United States.
