Raúl Ruiz

A coin and a cup of coffee on a table top. Raúl Ruiz gets the most from this minimal set-up, both visually and through the laconic soundtrack.

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The tragic story of the many lives of Father Dinis, his dark origins and his pious works, and the different fates of all those who, trapped in a sinister web of love, hate and crime, cross paths with him through years of adventure and misfortune in the convulsed Europe of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. (A longer television version of the film of the same name, released in 2010.)

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The tragic story of the many lives of Father Dinis, his dark origins and his pious works, and the different fates of all those who, trapped in a sinister web of love, hate and crime, cross paths with him through years of adventure.

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Surreal gothic comedy about a gambler who wins a strange Chilean mansion and takes his frail wife there.

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Absurdist short about a man with a suitcase and a man inside that suitcase.

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An ode to Chilean maritime myth and storytelling. Sailors onboard the Lucerna tell stories, but before long their stories intersect.

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Commissioned to mark the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, "To Each His Own Cinema" brought together 33 of the world's pre-eminent filmmakers to produce short pieces exploring the multifarious facets of cinema and their perspective on the state of their chosen artform in the early 21st century.

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This was a man. He lived with his mother. He cared a manor house in the countryside of Chile. One day the man found a bone in the garden. The bone was bored. That was a bone flute. The man with the flute music play. And music song became. The voice of the song begging to seek the other bones of his scattered body. The man and his mother were in those ways of God and hell, looking for the bones that make up the skeleton of that Christian. And give him a Christian burial. And they saw what they saw, they lived what they lived. Many stories lived. And although they did not tell anyone, others told them.

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This was a man. He lived with his mother. He cared a manor house in the countryside of Chile. One day the man found a bone in the garden. The bone was bored. That was a bone flute. The man with the flute music play. And music song became. The voice of the song begging to seek the other bones of his scattered body. The man and his mother were in those ways of God and hell, looking for the bones that make up the skeleton of that Christian. And give him a Christian burial. And they saw what they saw, they lived what they lived. Many stories lived. And although they did not tell anyone, others told them.

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A portrait of Austrian artist Gustav Klimt whose lavish, sexual paintings came to symbolize the art nouveau style of the late 19th and early 20th century.

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Set in 1973 during the coup d'etat in Chile, Max recalls his encounters in London during World War II with French aviator Antoine, a childhood hero he first met in his native country one morning in 1932 and who initiated him to the wonders of aviation.

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In a bar in Santiago, two old men talk over their past. This is a strange discussion. In fact, they talk of themselves as if they were dead. We don't know what is true or false, what is dream or reality.

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The film was made from the show Edipo Iperboreo (1989), directed by Ruiz. The shooting took place in Buti (Villa Medicea, Castello di Buti and the old Cinema di Cascine di Buti). The Fondazione Pontedera Teatro was able to complete production of the film in 2004.

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A film festival jury, composed of film professionals, judges a film about a court in which three terrorists who allegedly kidnapped a judge to try him are put on trial.

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A mediocre pulp novelist is approached by a stranger claiming to be a serial killer with a proposition to chronicle his crimes.

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A father is scheming to have his slightly mental daughter from an earlier marriage killed by allowing a murderous psychopath to be released from the asylum and led to his house. However, the psychopath and the daughter fall for each other.

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A chronicle of Raúl Ruiz’s production of Michèle Reverdy’s opera “Médée”.

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An experimental four-part 2002 Franco-Chilean digital video series written and directed by Raúl Ruiz. The first part won a FIPRESCI Award at the Montreal World Film Festival in 2002 "for the director's personal exploration into his homeland, using DV in a rigorous yet playful manner".

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In the early 2000s filmmaker Raul Ruiz followed painter Jean Miotte to different locations (New York, France, Germany).

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At a wake one night in 1945, a group of aged women recall the life of one of their number. Sixty years before, Thérèse was barely 20 years old when she eloped with her boyfriend, Firmin, a blacksmith, to Châtillon, a town in Provence. Here, she makes the acquaintance of the wealthy Madame Numance, who is known for her good deeds. Realising that Thérèse is pregnant and unemployed, Madame Numance insists that she moves into a house on her estate. Whilst Firmin resents the arrangement, Thérèse soon finds that she can exploit the situation, using her benefactor's naivety and generosity for her own gain..

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A serious young man of free spirit is forced by his surroundings to become rich at all costs. A group of blind children tries to open the eyes of the unbelievers to the Christian faith. Retired nuns who open a brothel, to pay the running costs of the convent. These rather ironic paradoxes turn this fairytale into a philosophical fable.

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Today, Camille turns nine. He had sworn that on his 9th birthday he would show his parents the videos he was shooting on the side - the tail of a cat scampering away, a window, and a veiled woman's face - an intriguing picture... Later that day, Camille's mother, Ariane, meets up with her son in the park. The boy appears perturbed. He is leaning against a tree, eyes cast down. He says that now he wants to return to his "real home" and his "real mother."

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In early 1920s France, an author, lying on his deathbed, looks at various photographs and is flooded with memories of the people and events that have shaped his life.

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Confusing realities surface in this paranoid film dealing with the fragile nature of a young woman recovering from rape and an apparent attempted suicide. In one reality, she is a killer destroyer of men. In another she is the new wife on a Jamaican honeymoon with her husband (William Baldwin), who is trying to help her recover. Which is real is the question as the story unfolds.

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If any single piece can act as a key to Ruiz, it may be the 1997 short Le Film à Venir (The Film to Come). The titular film is a holy fragment of celluloid that can only be seen by a secret society known as the Philokinetes. They watch it on a loop, somnambulating through a life that is unreal by comparison. It is the belief of the Philokinetes that film has an existence “independent from humans. Cinema, they said, is the primeval soup of a new life form. There from were to emerge pure screening creatures. Which is to say, non-topical beings.” - n+1

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An attorney defends a young man on trial for killing his aunt — a psychiatrist who took him in to study possible homicidal tendencies.

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Four intertwining stories of bizarre occurrences in Paris featuring a man who was stolen away by fairies, a professor who becomes a tramp, the lovers who inherit a chateau – and the last tale that connects all that has gone before.

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Anthology of short films about the French city of Nice, by various directors. A homage to Jean Vigo and his "À propos de Nice" from 1930.

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Pierre, a middle-aged tourist guide, is the victim of a sudden failure : he does not recognize anything about him any longer. He goes back home and in his apartment he finds a mysterious young man who tells him he is here to avenge a young woman who has taken her own life. What share of responsibility does Pierre hold in this situation?

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In Wind Water, Ruiz stages a three-way dialogue between three great cultures: Spain, China and Arabia. He imagines what might occur if Shih-T’ao’s six poetic procedures for attaining the primal respiration or cosmic breath in painting were applied to one of the flagships of European art, Velazquez’s Las Meninas. Ruiz wants the three cultures to interact and test each other like the paper, stone and scissors of the children’s game. The result is an insoluble dispute, a différend. No reconciliation or compromise is possible between these cultural outlooks.

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A coin and a cup of coffee on a table top. Raúl Ruiz gets the most from this minimal set-up, both visually and through the laconic soundtrack.

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In the fall of 2010, Bozon and co-conspirator Pascale Bodet commandeered the first floor of Paris’s famed Centre Pompidou for 10 days of screenings, lectures and performances that amounted to a counter-canonical history of French cinema. During the ensuing merriment (entitled Beaubourg, la dernière Major !) audience members were invited to observe the daily making of this film, directed by Bozon and written by Axelle Ropert, about an inexperienced young journalist (Laure Marsac) sent to the Pompidou to interview a maverick artistic impresario (Thomas Chabrol). The result is an unexpected love story that is also a record of this landmark exhibition, featuring cameos by Raul Ruiz, Paul Vecchiali, Luc Moullet and more !

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Raul Ruiz relates how he got out of Chile after Pinochet’s coup d’état and how he began making movies in Europe.

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An experimental four-part 2002 Franco-Chilean digital video series written and directed by Raúl Ruiz. The first part won a FIPRESCI Award at the Montreal World Film Festival in 2002 "for the director's personal exploration into his homeland, using DV in a rigorous yet playful manner".

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Serge Toubiana spent a year in the company of Isabelle Huppert. Where she went, he followed. Huppert is an around-the-clock actress so she doesn't need the cinema to exist – she embodies the cinema. When she's not performing, she doesn't exist. From film to film, on stage as on screen, Huppert invites us to survey those inner landscapes of hers that we don't yet know.

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"At that time (late 1992), I made a film for British television, Channel 4, called Las Soledades, the name of a long poem by Góngora. It was made in Chile, using many poetic elements of the country. Chile is seen through the eyes of a Chinese painter—a painter who uses the traditional 18th-century concepts of Shih-Tao. Once again, I am doing something that, apparently, is not meant to go hand in hand. The landscape of my country, southern Chile, where I was born, initially provokes in me a feeling of fear. The landscape is madness. In these crazy landscapes, you can find very reasonable people, which makes the landscape seem even crazier."

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Shortly after murdering his professor, a young man encounters a sailor who offers him a position on his ship in exchange for 3 Danish crowns and his attention as he recounts his life story.

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Michele is an MP for the Italian Communist Party who loses his memory in a car crash, though hardly anyone around him seems to notice. During a crucial water polo match on the eve of election day, he gradually begins to remember his past life, revealing a man whose personal and political identity crisis mirrors that of Italian communism itself.

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A series featuring six major artists and writers who live and work in exile.

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A charming tale of murder, perversity and narrative echoes told through shots of barking dogs and a La jetée-like series of stills.

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A fire started by Harry Thompson destroys the Liguria, a legendary ship of the 19th century, and its treasure of gold and diamonds sinks in the sea. Thompson manages to escape unaware that Albizetti sleeps in the same lifeboat he uses. They manage to arrive at a deserted island, which has also been reached on the opposite shore– by the other survivors of the shipwreck: three children, a woman and three men.

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This eccentric short directed by Keith Griffiths, outlines Ruiz’s work, biography and preoccupations and includes a rare interview with the director.

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Short film showing cinematographer Henri Alekan, director Raúl Ruiz and actress Olimpia Carlisi at work creating sublime visual effects of the sort seen in City of Pirates.

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Documentary in four parts on Latin American cinema. First episode: the influences of Cahiers du cinéma, the New Wave, Italian neorealism. In Brazil, Cinema Novo draws inspiration from these models while drawing on the historical and cultural singularity of the country. The documentary was awarded the Prix Makhila d’or at the Festival de Biarritz, France.

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Documentary in four parts on Latin American cinema. Third episode: from the 1960s, France and Europe showed a real enthusiasm for Latin American cinema, but the latter remained hampered by numerous economic and political obstacles.

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Reel 23 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

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Portrait of "cinéaste" Ruiz, seemingly at his typewriter, in Courant's ongoing "Cinématon" series.

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A thriller in which the characters are Latin-American exiles living in Paris. It is also a comedy about artists who play at revolution rather than actually participate in one

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Racial, social and cultural aspects of La Paz (called Chuquiago by the Aymaras) seen through four stories.

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The young Marcela leaves her small Chilean village and travels to Santiago in order to find work as a secretary.

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A coin and a cup of coffee on a table top. Raúl Ruiz gets the most from this minimal set-up, both visually and through the laconic soundtrack.

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The tragic story of the many lives of Father Dinis, his dark origins and his pious works, and the different fates of all those who, trapped in a sinister web of love, hate and crime, cross paths with him through years of adventure and misfortune in the convulsed Europe of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. (A longer television version of the film of the same name, released in 2010.)

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Surreal gothic comedy about a gambler who wins a strange Chilean mansion and takes his frail wife there.

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After long decades of exile, a leftist former activist returns to Chile to settle accounts with his conscience, related to the death of a colleague and political hero . The task of Atalibar is to reveal his secret. But his view clashes with the current country, godless, far from the old ideologies and where all his old colleagues have changed.

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Absurdist short about a man with a suitcase and a man inside that suitcase.

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An ode to Chilean maritime myth and storytelling. Sailors onboard the Lucerna tell stories, but before long their stories intersect.

Open details →

This was a man. He lived with his mother. He cared a manor house in the countryside of Chile. One day the man found a bone in the garden. The bone was bored. That was a bone flute. The man with the flute music play. And music song became. The voice of the song begging to seek the other bones of his scattered body. The man and his mother were in those ways of God and hell, looking for the bones that make up the skeleton of that Christian. And give him a Christian burial. And they saw what they saw, they lived what they lived. Many stories lived. And although they did not tell anyone, others told them.

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This was a man. He lived with his mother. He cared a manor house in the countryside of Chile. One day the man found a bone in the garden. The bone was bored. That was a bone flute. The man with the flute music play. And music song became. The voice of the song begging to seek the other bones of his scattered body. The man and his mother were in those ways of God and hell, looking for the bones that make up the skeleton of that Christian. And give him a Christian burial. And they saw what they saw, they lived what they lived. Many stories lived. And although they did not tell anyone, others told them.

Open details →

A portrait of Austrian artist Gustav Klimt whose lavish, sexual paintings came to symbolize the art nouveau style of the late 19th and early 20th century.

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Set in 1973 during the coup d'etat in Chile, Max recalls his encounters in London during World War II with French aviator Antoine, a childhood hero he first met in his native country one morning in 1932 and who initiated him to the wonders of aviation.

Open details →

In a bar in Santiago, two old men talk over their past. This is a strange discussion. In fact, they talk of themselves as if they were dead. We don't know what is true or false, what is dream or reality.

Open details →

A film festival jury, composed of film professionals, judges a film about a court in which three terrorists who allegedly kidnapped a judge to try him are put on trial.

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A mediocre pulp novelist is approached by a stranger claiming to be a serial killer with a proposition to chronicle his crimes.

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A father is scheming to have his slightly mental daughter from an earlier marriage killed by allowing a murderous psychopath to be released from the asylum and led to his house. However, the psychopath and the daughter fall for each other.

Open details →

An experimental four-part 2002 Franco-Chilean digital video series written and directed by Raúl Ruiz. The first part won a FIPRESCI Award at the Montreal World Film Festival in 2002 "for the director's personal exploration into his homeland, using DV in a rigorous yet playful manner".

Open details →

A serious young man of free spirit is forced by his surroundings to become rich at all costs. A group of blind children tries to open the eyes of the unbelievers to the Christian faith. Retired nuns who open a brothel, to pay the running costs of the convent. These rather ironic paradoxes turn this fairytale into a philosophical fable.

Open details →

Today, Camille turns nine. He had sworn that on his 9th birthday he would show his parents the videos he was shooting on the side - the tail of a cat scampering away, a window, and a veiled woman's face - an intriguing picture... Later that day, Camille's mother, Ariane, meets up with her son in the park. The boy appears perturbed. He is leaning against a tree, eyes cast down. He says that now he wants to return to his "real home" and his "real mother."

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Madeleine is with her lover, Jean-Paul, when her husband arrives home and catches the two together. Madeleine kills her husband and tells Jean-Paul to flee before the police arrive. After Jean-Paul drives away, he picks up a hitchhiker. When the car, stolen by the hitchhiker, explodes, police believe the dead hitchhiker is Jean-Paul. Madeleine takes up with Jean-Paul's brother, Bastien, while Jean-Paul, arriving in Strasbourg, is mistaken for the heir to a fortune. The detective on the case spends more time writing crime novels than investigating real-life crimes.

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If any single piece can act as a key to Ruiz, it may be the 1997 short Le Film à Venir (The Film to Come). The titular film is a holy fragment of celluloid that can only be seen by a secret society known as the Philokinetes. They watch it on a loop, somnambulating through a life that is unreal by comparison. It is the belief of the Philokinetes that film has an existence “independent from humans. Cinema, they said, is the primeval soup of a new life form. There from were to emerge pure screening creatures. Which is to say, non-topical beings.” - n+1

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An attorney defends a young man on trial for killing his aunt — a psychiatrist who took him in to study possible homicidal tendencies.

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The story of a neurotic bachelor who, after marrying a beautiful woman, submits her to increasingly deranged accusations of infidelity and pleas for forgiveness.

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Four intertwining stories of bizarre occurrences in Paris featuring a man who was stolen away by fairies, a professor who becomes a tramp, the lovers who inherit a chateau – and the last tale that connects all that has gone before.

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Pierre, a middle-aged tourist guide, is the victim of a sudden failure : he does not recognize anything about him any longer. He goes back home and in his apartment he finds a mysterious young man who tells him he is here to avenge a young woman who has taken her own life. What share of responsibility does Pierre hold in this situation?

Open details →

In Wind Water, Ruiz stages a three-way dialogue between three great cultures: Spain, China and Arabia. He imagines what might occur if Shih-T’ao’s six poetic procedures for attaining the primal respiration or cosmic breath in painting were applied to one of the flagships of European art, Velazquez’s Las Meninas. Ruiz wants the three cultures to interact and test each other like the paper, stone and scissors of the children’s game. The result is an insoluble dispute, a différend. No reconciliation or compromise is possible between these cultural outlooks.

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A wild short made as part of a filmmaking workshop that Raúl Ruiz ran in Bogotá in October 1993.

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A surreal travel drama, shot on Sicility with Italian actors. IlViaggio Clandestino is a film about saints and sinners. Whether you areblessed or doomed is often dependent on someone's soul that on whether theypray or suffer. The kindred spirit of San Gil ! the Holy Gil ! is CiccioBavaria who, unilke the former, continues to seek sin. For Bavaria sin isliberating and dynamic. The film tells the story of the journey made by thesetwo protagonists; a journey that leads to the demise of San Gil, while Bavariais reincarnated as Buddha. There is another traveller, a clandestinetraveller. Christ, always fleeing the angels. This Christ does not helphumanity with miracles, but by keeping himself alive as best he can givingweather forecasts.In this strange sainty story, Ruiz allowed himself ot be inspired byapocryphal books about saints of flesh and blood.

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A young working class girl falls in love with an upper class boy who is part of the plot to assassinate General Schneider, head of the Chilean Army. The film was shot in 1973 over six weeks with a budget of $170,000. As a result of the 1973 Chilean coup d'état and military dictatorship (1973–1990), the film was presumed lost for many years and not released until 1992.

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In this mystical comedy, Felicien has traveled to Portugal from France soon after the end of the First World War. It seems that his recently deceased father had invested a lot of money in a factory located in a remote village, and he has come to evaluate that investment. He gets some clues to the real situation in the town when the man driving his coach refuses to go any further and leaves him on a section of road which is practically paved with abandoned crutches. After a short trek, he meets up with the local dignitary who is to show him around, and he meets a priest and an artist. The priest gives a further clue to the events taking place in the village when he indicates that he's completely exasperated with the endless miracles that seem to be taking place. From that point onward, amazing coincidences, visions and miracles take place in great numbers.

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A well-bred young woman who prizes the virtue of fidelity remains faithful to the doctor who deflowers her, even after he marries her invalid sister.

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All the characters are in hell, but they act as though the are in a sitcom, with canned laughter. It's based on Arcana Celestia by Swedenborg, a Swedish esoteric theologian from the 18th Century who started seeing ghosts, angels and demons around him. Instead of seeing a physician about it, he accepted the fact and began studying and interviewing his own hallucinations, like an anthropologist. He was convinced that people in hell are happy, because you find what you want there.

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Shortly after murdering his professor, a young man encounters a sailor who offers him a position on his ship in exchange for 3 Danish crowns and his attention as he recounts his life story.

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