In 1944, a dashing German soldier and a beautiful French girl fell deeply in love while World War II raged on. More than forty years later, Ernest Kestner, retired and recently widowed, leaves his adopted home in New York and returns to France to visit his headstrong, estranged daughter, with the fleeting hope of finding the love he was forced to leave behind. But this is no ordinary vacation in the charming French countryside. The mood is strangely dark, and what Kestner and his daughter encounter is completely unexpected as the veteran soldier seeks the ultimate Souvenir - born from the ashes of a horrible, hidden secret. Based on the true story of Oradour-sur-Glane, a French town that was nearly wiped out near the end of WWII. Most every man, woman and child was gunned down or burned in retaliation for the French Resistance. The entire ruined town has been preserved as a national memorial. - Written by Mackinac Media Inc.

Elisabeth is married to a German and has a young daughter. She leaves her husband and child behind to trace the path of women’s rights activist Flora Tristan (1803–1844). The young, French historian takes the train to Lyon, where the early socialist spent the year before her death trying to create a Workers’ Union; ten thousand of them would later join her funeral procession. Elisabeth roams the streets and byways, using a Dictaphone to record the sounds of the city. Her goal is to reconstruct a sense memory of Tristan’s life, and in doing so, she finds the city to be an historical echo chamber: “Maybe I should have become a private detective”. During her research, stroller Elisabeth delves into different time periods. Her search for traces of history is an attempt to construct recorded history as a series of subjective recollections. And at this point in time, Blind Spot has itself become an historical documentation – in dolly shots and stills, the film “inhales” Lyon’s working class neighbourhood of La Croix-Rousse, which has today become the hipster district.

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.