Raúl Ruiz’s City of Pirates is a surrealist film that blends folk legends, poetic disorientation, children’s adventure tales, and Hollywood horror into a hypnotic, nonlinear narrative. Echoing the spirit of Buñuel, Dalí, and Breton, Ruiz weaves dream logic, absurd humour, and automatic writing into a tale of a sleepwalking virgin, a ten-year-old boy who claims to have raped and murdered his entire family, and the lone inhabitant of an island castle who shares his body with an imaginary sister. The young Isidore drifts through this eerie island landscape populated by ghostly figures, unsettling desires, and symbolic objects, driven by trances, madness, and elusive longing. Themes of child murder, incestuous yearning, and mythic doubles shape a shifting quest for identity in a world where meaning constantly slips away. Rather than offering a clear plot, Ruiz conjures an experience in which desire and meaning circle endlessly, never reaching resolution. 

‘There are films we’re not sure we haven’t dreamed. Perhaps those are the most beautiful. Such is this new adventure of Captain Ruiz in the land of our beliefs.’ That is how Serge Daney begins his text on City of Pirates, after which he tries to grasp the many signs of the labyrinth universe into which the film transports us: the ghost of the American B-movie, Cocteau, Hammer Film Productions, John Mohune from Moonfleet, Tourneur, and so on. ‘All this, you might say,’ Daney concludes ‘has a name. Yes: Seduction. But it is the form that is seductive. What remains is the content. Ruiz is not a hollow aesthete. There is substance to his stories, and I believe it to be terrible. A substance of filth and promiscuity that no poetry can ever completely silence.’

‘In dreams, we find sequences and archetypal forms of montage that existed before cinema. The following montage: close-up / direction of the gaze / object seen by the person looking / that person’s reaction—already appears in dreams before the cinematic image. There is a kind of pleasurable incompleteness specific to both dream and cinema. For a long time, a distinction has been made between cinema as dream and cinema as memory. But in the case of cinema as memory, it is a mirror with the ability to remember; in the dream system, cinema precisely breaks the mirror. And yet we still search for a single image. As for me, I tend to mix the two and think that cinema functions both as a memory of the dream and as a mirror of events—by making them strange enough to tear them away from the mechanical nature of life, from representation, and restore to them a function of correspondence.’ – Raúl Ruiz