Ruiz's debut feature (funded by “a syndicate of retired Merchant Marine captains,” according to him) adapts a popular play involving a seedy older brother who prostitutes his younger sister. Setting itself in fixed opposition to the heaving Mexican melodramas which then dominated Chilean popular culture, the film pointedly disregards their overly dramatic aesthetic and creates instead a hyper-realist, Cassavettes-like style more concerned with everyday realities. “I wanted the spectators to recognize themselves,” Ruiz noted. Creating a Chilean New Wave from scratch-the mainly Argentine crew were culled from documentary projects, the actors from “the theater of Noel Coward”-Tres Tristes Tigres came from nowhere, and embodies the first break of a film movement that was soon dammed by the military coup.