The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror

Raúl Ruiz’s unfinished, long-lost feature debut – a surreal tale of death and blurred identity – is finally brought to the screen by his widow, Valeria Sarmiento.

After the apparent suicide of his wife, a man is haunted by her ghost – and her wigs seem to have taken on a life of their own. Slowly but surely, he begins to both adopt her identity and seek to replicate her fate, but a secret is lurking beneath the forward march of time.

Considered lost until its negative was discovered in a theatre cellar in 2016, The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror was to be the 1967 debut feature of legendary surrealist auteur Raúl Ruiz (The Wandering Soap Opera, MIFF 2018; Mysteries of Lisbon, MIFF 2011), abandoned upon the filmmaker’s flight from Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. Completed and reworked more than 50 years later by his life partner and long-time artistic collaborator, Valeria Sarmiento, along with a team of lip-readers and voice actors, the film is at once a fascinating insight into the early emergence of Ruiz’s experimental sensibility and a strange and singular experimental work in its own right.

“An eerie, imaginative story … Brings to mind the feverish experimentation of the late 1960s.” – MUBI NotebookRaúl Ruiz’s unfinished, long-lost feature debut – a surreal tale of death and blurred identity – is finally brought to the screen by his widow, Valeria Sarmiento.

After the apparent suicide of his wife, a man is haunted by her ghost – and her wigs seem to have taken on a life of their own. Slowly but surely, he begins to both adopt her identity and seek to replicate her fate, but a secret is lurking beneath the forward march of time.

Considered lost until its negative was discovered in a theatre cellar in 2016, The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror was to be the 1967 debut feature of legendary surrealist auteur Raúl Ruiz (The Wandering Soap Opera, MIFF 2018; Mysteries of Lisbon, MIFF 2011), abandoned upon the filmmaker’s flight from Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. Completed and reworked more than 50 years later by his life partner and long-time artistic collaborator, Valeria Sarmiento, along with a team of lip-readers and voice actors, the film is at once a fascinating insight into the early emergence of Ruiz’s experimental sensibility and a strange and singular experimental work in its own right.

“An eerie, imaginative story … Brings to mind the feverish experimentation of the late 1960s.” – MUBI Notebook