Raul Ruiz, a Chilean director currently working in Europe, was the subject of an April 1984 retrospective at PFA, and his film The Three Crowns of the Sailor was a highlight of the 1984 San Francisco Film Festival. Ruiz describes City of Pirates, shot in France and Portugal, as “the story of the impossible love between a maidservant and a child assassin on a semi-deserted island. It is the story of the conflict between a child who ran away and a woman who could be (who should be) his mother, and who oppresses him in a thousand ways. It is the story of a child pushing his mother into committing suicide or into becoming a slave. It is the story of an assassin who hides on an island and who sees his executioner coming to meet him--an executioner in the form of a child who is the exact copy of himself as a child. There are three stories that fuse into one--a free variation on the theme of Peter Pan.”
A Cahiers du Cinema (October '83) review notes, “Ruiz comes back to his most personal theme: towards his passion for illusion, the labyrinths of ideas and false ideas, characters and false characters...and weaves a spell on his viewers.”