The film starts off with an unseen narrator (who I think is meant to be director Raoul Ruiz) waking up to a surreal experience (which may be a dream) in which his dead uncle and another man his uncle knew show up at his house for a game of cards. After this dream the narrator wakes up in Chile four months later where he revisits his old hometown and the surrounding area including a school. As he subsequently finds himself uncontrollably traveling back and forth between France and Chile he realizes he must find a way to control these trips.
So to make sense of this film it's important to realize Ruiz left Chile in the 1970s for political reasons and he has spent most of his time since then in France. This short is about his attempts to reconcile the mysticism he associates with his homeland to the rationalism he associates with the outside world. So we see a school where children are learning these old fashioned mythologies of how the world works and we see how Chile even looks different than a post-industrial country like France. For awhile Ruiz the narrator is torn between they two types of culture, the different personas he adapted himself into for each culture is struggling for dominance and he's at war with himself. Eventually he realizes that he as an artist can juxtapose the mysticism of Chile and the rationalism of France through his work which is represented by the seahorse that helps him create the stories we hear the younger version of himself reading. Thus he manages to combine the two personas and make them work together instead of at odds with one another. This film can be seen as Ruiz's mission statement.
So to make sense of this film it's important to realize Ruiz left Chile in the 1970s for political reasons and he has spent most of his time since then in France. This short is about his attempts to reconcile the mysticism he associates with his homeland to the rationalism he associates with the outside world. So we see a school where children are learning these old fashioned mythologies of how the world works and we see how Chile even looks different than a post-industrial country like France. For awhile Ruiz the narrator is torn between they two types of culture, the different personas he adapted himself into for each culture is struggling for dominance and he's at war with himself. Eventually he realizes that he as an artist can juxtapose the mysticism of Chile and the rationalism of France through his work which is represented by the seahorse that helps him create the stories we hear the younger version of himself reading. Thus he manages to combine the two personas and make them work together instead of at odds with one another. This film can be seen as Ruiz's mission statement.
