Love Torn in a Dream

Love Torn in a Dream (French: Combat d'amour en songe) is a 2000 film directed by Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz. The film's nonlinear narrative spans nine interweaving stories, most of which take place in the 17th or 18th centuries and feature fantastical characters such as pirates, nuns, young priests, a cannibal, a sultana, the Devil, and many more. To further complicate the already dizzying web of tales, many different characters are played by the same handful of actors across stories. This theme of the same individual portraying numerous identities extends beyond the limits of this one film (as many of Ruiz's themes do) and can be viewed in the larger context of Ruiz's work: for instance, lead actor Melvil Poupaud has been in several of Ruiz's films since his childhood. In 1983, at the age of ten, he starred in Ruiz's City of Pirates and went on to act in The Insomniac on the Bridge (1985), Treasure Island (1985), Three Lives and Only One Death (1996), Genealogies of a Crime (1997) and Mysteries of Lisbon (2010).

Shot in Sintra (where Ruiz had made The Territory almost 20 years previously) and produced by Gemini Films, Madroga Filmes, Canal+ and Radiotelevisao Portuguesa, among others, Love Torn in a Dream premiered in August 2000 at the Montreal World Film Festival where it won a FIPRESCI Prize. From there, it went on to be released in France in November 2000, in Portugal in May 2001, in the Netherlands in January 2002 at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and in Poland in October 2002 at the Warsaw Film Festival.[1]