Night Across the Street

On the verge of forced retirement, an elderly office worker (Sergio Hernández) begins reliving memories from his past, both real and imagined: a trip to the movies as a young boy with Beethoven, listening to tall tales from Long John Silver, a brief stay in a haunted hotel, conversations with a writer’s fictional doppelgänger. Stories are hidden within stories and the thin line between imagination and reality steadily erodes, opening up a marvelous new world of personal remembrance and melodrama. In his final masterwork, loosely adapted from the fantastical short stories of Chilean writer Hernán del Solar, Ruiz has crafted a playfully elegiac film that addresses his favorite subjects: fiction, history, and life itself. An NYFF50 selection.