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On location in Portugal, a film crew runs out of film while making their own version of Roger Corman's The Day the World Ended (1956). The producer is nowhere to be found and director Munro attempts to find him in hopes of being able to finish the film.

Narrator: James Mason
[ 3 Episodes ] :
+ Episode 1: My Happiest Years
+ Episode 2: The Great Director
+ Episode 3: Hidden Treasures

In this dense setting, the inhabitants of a large, claustrophobic apartment reveal their darkest secrets, fears, obsessions and hostilities.

1984 film by Luc Moullet

Guan Jian wants to report the murder of his father who died 10 years ago. The alleged murderer whom Guan Jian accuses of the crime is his own mother.

Totems of destruction and desire. An operation on the combustible urges in a junk black mass. A swiftly-sliced nightmare of history and erotic autobiography.

In 1941 America, Kay and her husband are happy enough until he enlists after Pearl Harbor. Against his wishes, she takes a job at the local aircraft plant where she meets Hazel, the singer from across the way. The two soon become firm friends and with the other girls become increasingly expert workers. As the war drags on, Kay finally dates her trumpet-playing foreman and life gets more complicated.

This three part French TV serial for children (alternate versions exist as a feature, Manoel's Destinies, and a 4 part Portuguese TV serial, Adventure in Madeira) is the favourite of many devotees of Raúl Ruiz. This is because it ties the enchantment and mystery of Lewis Carroll, Carlo Collodi and the Brothers Grimm to the filmmaker's experiments with narrative strategies and what he calls the pentaludic model of storytelling (where characters are thrown dice-like into combinations and situations governed by the play of Chance and Destiny).
But this film for children is among his most complex works, hard to grasp in its totality. Often it can seem an arbitrary collection of free-associational images and words, bordering on nonsense. But attentive viewers will have the strong sense that there is method behind this near-madness. Otherwise, it could never produce the intense emotions it so clearly offers. Ruiz's obsessions from film to film bind the fragments together – within a single work and across projects – and the emotion comes from the totally unexpected forking taken within a well-worn territorial map.
Part One presents us with three possible worlds. In each world, seven year-old Manoel has a different response to an entreaty from the outside world. Fittingly, in this film in which nothing coincides, the three parts of the story do not coincide with the three-episode structure (the trinity-form recurs frequently in Ruiz). In this case, past, present and future – the unholy trinity or Time en soi – is the film's very protagonist, variously called 'long ago' (Part One), 'now' (Part Two), and 'future' (Part Three). At the outset, this gives the story an apparent order before digressions take it over.
Part Two (the status of which is at first confusing since it begins after the three mini-narratives of the first Part and before the end of Episode One) is entitled 'The Picnic of Dreams'. Whilst vaguely 'keeping to the storyline', it veers off in many different directions, where the thematic coupling ordinary/special replaces the familiar/unknown dualism of Part One. (Each Part is guided by a thematic 'dominant', a pair of notions that tend to exchange their meanings as it progresses.)
Part Three (beginning in Episode Two), entitled 'The Little Chess-Champion', hands the (until now) off-screen voice-over narration to Manoel himself. He promises to tell his own story, but adds that it's 'a story that I made up in my distant childhood and that happens in the future'. The tone is less Baroque, more Gothic, as Ruiz explores the 'wonders of the night'. The filmmaker's obsession in this section concerns perception and the deciphering of secret signs and codes.

A Manhattan professor's (William Raymond, Larry Loonin) unseen artist wife mocks his pitiful existence.

One of the most remarkable and innovative documentaries ever made, this film follows the famous true story of two English women who as babies got switched in the hospital and 20 years later discovered that they'd been raised by the wrong sets of parents. Romand enlists all the surviving family members in her haunting and bizarre investigation, which involves not only a recounting but a reenactment of all the significant events in the two daughters' emotional histories.

Twenty-three-year-old Peter Foster is an only child who lives at home, where he constantly hears his parents arguing. Because Peter does nothing all day, the family goes to a clinic where a therapist videotapes them. After Peter watches his tape, he views the tape of a troubled Armenian family, who gave their only son away for adoption when they arrived in Canada. Peter decides to visit this family, and he pretends to be their son, Bedros Deryan. The Deryan family welcomes him with open arms, and Peter tries to patch up the poor relationship between George Deryan and his daughter Azah.

A series of the awkward trials of everyday living.

1986 film by Leos Carax

1986 film by Alain Resnais

Documentary about the lives of three Mexican families living in the U.S. without government paperwork.

It takes as its starting point two plays by the Spanish Golden Age dramatist
Calderón de la Barca, which Ruiz had directed on the stage; both of which were
called Life is a Dream and tell the same story but in different ways. The original
plays concern the son of the King of Poland, who has been imprisoned by his
father because it is predicted that he will depose him. One day the king orders
the sleeping son to be brought to the palace and given to believe that he is king
for a day, causing his son to be confused about what is real and what is a dream.
In Ruiz’s film, a literature teacher has learned by heart the names of 15,000
militants opposed to the military junta in Chile by memorising Calderón’s play and
using it as a mnemonic device. When he is captured, he has to forget everything
so as not to betray his comrades, but ten years later he tries to recapture his
memory by visiting a cinema showing a film based on Life is a Dream. Ruiz uses
this setting to explore a complex set of relations dealing with memory and the
layering of reality. The film is also about the experience of cinema, as the virtuality
of the film is confounded with the materiality of the cinema auditorium,
which becomes a place in which the story is enacted. For instance, characters on
a train, whom we at first take to be part of the film the teacher is watching, are
revealed to be on a model train set that runs around the cinema, in which other
strange things occur: birds fly around the auditorium and a Western shoot-out
takes place across the seats.

Episode one: The Happy child :
The fourth child of a poor couple, whom live in Halabiabad (a dispossessed place in Tehran), is born. In the maternity they tell them that if the child does not have good nutrition he would become paralyzed as well. The couple, who have 3 retarded and handicapped children- as a result of family marriage-know that because of poverty they cannot take care of their newborn child and they are worried that he would encounter the same fate as the other three children. They decide to make their child prosperous and they take him to a sanitarium for handicapped and retarded children but very soon the bitter future of the child comes into the mother’s mind. Then they decide to put the child in the way so that a good person takes the child with him and makes him prosperous but no one would take the child, but poor people and for making money. Eventually they leave the child by the swimming pool of an aristocratic house and leave, unaware of the fact that the child ends up in the sanitarium of handicapped and retarded children once again.
Episode two: Birth of an old woman :
A young boy, who has psychic signs in his behavior and words, nurses his old and handicapped mother, who does not even have the ability to talk, with patience and comprehension in an humble house. One day when he leaves the house towards the bank to get his monthly pension, he has an accident with a vehicle and the passersby steal his money. The young boy, who is worried about his mother’s conditions escapes from the hospital with a bandaged head, while the old woman has died in his absence. But in the house he still treats her mother as if she is alive.
Episode three: The peddler :
A group of smugglers who have unlawful activities under the cover of selling second hand clothes, take a peddler, who was their accomplice and witness of their crime, with themselves by force to kill him. The young peddler, who has arguments with the leader of the group over his life all the time, is thinking of escaping from this predicament, but all these escapes are only in his mind…

Description: NY TIMES REVIEW
JEAN-PIERRE GORIN, its French-born director, describes ''Routine Pleasures'' as a film essay about ''America - under-budget and in a shoe box,'' which is accurate as far as it goes.
The film is also a funny, very personal meditation on the activities of a group of model-railroad buffs in Del Mar, Calif., crosscut with random examples of the wit and wisdom of the seminal film critic Manny Farber, two of whose paintings are also examined in detail.
''Routine Pleasures" makes a point of never quite coming to a point. It's a movie that ponders possibilities and then moves on to other possibilities. It examines the vaguely interconnecting obsessions of the model railroaders and those of Mr. Farber, whose appreciation for Hollywood B-movies of the 1930's, especially those that deal with blue-collar workers, predates the ''discovery'' of those films by the Cahiers du Cinema critics in the 1950's and 1960's.
Mr. Gorin is fascinated and amused by the dedication of the model railroaders, a small group of men, age 16 to 70-odd, who meet twice a week in a former airplane hangar where they've constructed an elaborate, small-gauge railroad system.
On Tuesday nights they run their trains - freight and passenger -through delicately reproduced, miniature landscapes, cities and railroad yards, keeping to schedules measured in miniature time. Every six minutes equals an hour on the clocks by which they run their system. Thursday nights are devoted to repairing and refurbishing the rolling stock, the tracks and the scenery, and to trading railroad stories. One of the best of these is about a man whose mysterious, utterly American fate was always to order apple pie in a restaurant that had just run out.
Mr. Farber, who has been a friend to Mr. Gorin ever since the director came here from France in the 1970's, is seen only in still pictures, and as he is reflected in two of his oil paintings, ''Birthplace: Douglas, Ariz.,'' 1979, and ''Have a Chew on Me,'' 1983. Mr. Gorin, however, quotes him at length (and sometimes, because of Mr. Gorin's accent, not all too intelligibly), in attempting to draw parallels between Mr. Farber's ideas on America, art and movies and the railroaders' passion for living out their twice-weekly fantasies.
Scale is one of the themes. ''Life isn't too big a deal,'' Mr. Gorin quotes Mr. Farber as saying, ''and shouldn't be painted as such.'' Mr. Farber's two paintings are filled with representations of specific objects, people and events. The model railroaders' dreams are realized in scaled-down representations of real trains running through real places on real schedules.
''Routine Pleasures'' isn't strong on coherence, but coherence isn't what this sort of film is all about. It's meant to provoke questions rather than to answer them, which effectively deflects all criticism. Possibly far more provocative than this chatty, handsomely photographed essay would have been two separate films - one about the model railroaders and one about Manny Farber. But those two films might have turned out far more routine and far less pleasurable than this one.
''Routine Pleasures'' is Mr. Gorin's second American feature, following his expert 1980 documentary, ''Poto and Cabengo.'' Once known primarily as Jean-Luc Godard's collaborator during his Maoist years (''Tout Va Bien,'' ''Letter to Jane,'' ''Vladimir and Rosa,'' among others), Mr. Gorin is now clearly a film maker with his own style and obsessions, as well as a man with his own sense of humor. Eclectic Essay ROUTINE PLEASURES, directed by Jean-Pierre Gorin; written by Mr. Gorin and Patrick Amos; cinematography by Babette Mangolte; edited by Mr. Gorin, Miss Mangolte and Mr. Amos; produced by ZDF, Institut National de la Communication Audiovisuelle, Channel Four Television, London, and Jean-Pierre Gorin Productions.

When Nicole, a young copy-shop employee, is hired to translate an ancient Chinese manuscript, she soon finds that the document has strange powers that little by little begin to exert an eerie influence over her life.

Joan Braderman talks about and appears in front of a projected version of the soap opera Dynasty.