1987 television film

H., 35, an Arabian immigrant, works as projectionist in an old cinema. One day, drawn by the music, he looks through the window of the booth and is fascinated: the dancer he sees on the screen seems to be looking straight into his eyes. He falls in love with her, but the vision last only a moment. Shortly afterwards, an elderly man storms into the projection booth and claims he is his uncle.
 H. wants to prepare a meal for him and reaches for the oil bottle: he sees the same dancer on the label…. H begins to find echoes of his own life in the images he projects. Everything changes when fiction and reality merge...

Ombres chinoises was produced for the French TV magazine Juste une Image, a monthly show which in its almost three years of production cataloged all kinds of visual experimentations: from Muybridge to the latest computer animation of the New York Institute of Technology. I.N.A. asked for Ruiz's participation for the April 1982 show. He decided to produce Ombres Chinoises (probably a project that was wandering in his mind long before), a catalog of dramatic situations acted out by Chinese shadows with voice-over narrations. Nothing comes closer to the Ruizian aesthetics.

Two insomniacs,a peeping tom teacher and a hunch-backed boxer,meet one night on the Alma bridge.They watch a couple who takes a walk on the banks of the Seine:the woman is pregnant.Some time later ,they meet up with her again and rape her.She commits suicide.Both criminals abuse other victims ,including a doctor's patient.This physician was their first victim's husband. （IMDB）

It takes as its starting point two plays by the Spanish Golden Age dramatist Calderón de la Barca, which Ruiz had directed on the stage; both of which were called Life is a Dream and tell the same story but in different ways. The original plays concern the son of the King of Poland, who has been imprisoned by his father because it is predicted that he will depose him. One day the king orders the sleeping son to be brought to the palace and given to believe that he is king for a day, causing his son to be confused about what is real and what is a dream. In Ruiz’s film, a literature teacher has learned by heart the names of 15,000 militants opposed to the military junta in Chile by memorising Calderón’s play and using it as a mnemonic device. When he is captured, he has to forget everything so as not to betray his comrades, but ten years later he tries to recapture his memory by visiting a cinema showing a film based on Life is a Dream. Ruiz uses this setting to explore a complex set of relations dealing with memory and the layering of reality. The film is also about the experience of cinema, as the virtuality of the film is confounded with the materiality of the cinema auditorium, which becomes a place in which the story is enacted. For instance, characters on a train, whom we at first take to be part of the film the teacher is watching, are revealed to be on a model train set that runs around the cinema, in which other strange things occur: birds fly around the auditorium and a Western shoot-out takes place across the seats.

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.