A parody of anthropology, linguistics, and cultural imperialism. The film follows an unlikely team of linguists into the wilds of an ersatz Patagonia to study the last speakers of a dying language. That language apparently consists of a single word, which therefore means everything.

The film revolves around the concept of soap opera. Its structure is based on the assumption that Chilean reality does not exist, but rather is an ensemble of soap operas.

These six video segments (10 minutes each) were originally developed for broadcast on Channel 4 as the second installment in the larger, never completed, series comissioned for Peter Greenaway and Tom Philips' A TV Dante (1989). But it was never aired. Ruiz's treatment of the six Cantos can be taken together as a bridge between his previous visions of hell in Mémoire des apparences AKA Life is a Dream (1986) and La Chouette aveugle (1987) and themore recent series of essay videos that he has made for Chilean television under the title Cofralandes (2002).

In the late 1980s, a politically neutral photographer in Pinochet's Chile is still struggling to come to terms with the "disappearance" of his activist brother in the Villa Grimaldi torture centre back in 1975.

A well-bred young woman who prizes the virtue of fidelity remains faithful to the doctor who deflowers her, even after he marries her invalid sister.