1-World Festival of Foreign Films
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"On Top of the Whale"
1982
Directed by Raul Ruiz

Shot in five languages (one of them imaginary), this film concerns a European anthropological expedition to Patagonia. The ethnologists set out to study a tribe of Indians which now consists of merely two surviving members who speak a strange language made up of only a few phrases (different meanings are produced by varying the inflections). A humorous and intellectual film written and directed by Raul Ruiz, one of the most inventive filmmakers working in Europe today, On Top of the Whale is filled with audacious visual ideas, and its cold and misty Northern images often recall Murnau. English, Spanish, French, Dutch and German with English subtitles.  93 minutes.