Mysteries of Lisbon: The Original Six-Part Miniseries

Mysteries of Lisbon: The Original Six-Part Miniseries has ended its run in our Virtual Cinema.

Arguably Chile’s most internationally renowned and prolific filmmaker, Raúl 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 had 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, set against the backdrop of Portugal’s 1820 revolution. This May, Film at Lincoln Center is pleased to present the original six-hour mini-series, never before released in the United States. A Music Box Films release.