The Blind Owl

One of many loose screen adaptation by Ruiz—here of the Iranian author Sadegh Hadayat’s semi-autobiographical novel—The Blind Owl is a signature work of the director’s 1980s output. A Parisian film projectionist receives a surprise visit from his Apollinaire-reciting uncle and falls in love with a dancer who appears in a movie he projects, triggering a delirious succession of stories within stories that lures us ever deeper into a quintessentially Ruizian labyrinth of fantasy and desire. In praising The Blind Owl as “French cinema’s most beautiful jewel” of its decade, the French filmmaker-critic Luc Moullet wrote that “it is at once an enormous joke and a cosmic, existential work on the human condition.”