Raoul Ruiz, filmmaker and visionary, dies at 70

PARIS -- French-Chilean filmmaker Raoul Ruiz, who was revered for his singular literary adaptations, died of complications from pulmonary infection Thursday in Paris. He was 70.A prolific and critically-acclaimed helmer, Ruiz had won Gaul's Louis Delluc prize, the film equivalent to the French literary Goncourt prize, for "Mysteries of Lisbon."Ruiz, who was fighting a cancer discovered two years ago while filming "Lisbon," was still highly dedicated to his work as a film director.The filmmaker had just completed lensing "La Noche de enfrente" strarring Christian Vadim, and he was prepping "As Linhas de Torres," a Portugal-set war drama, which had Mathieu Almaric, John Malkovich and Lea Seydoux attached to star.The helmer fled to France in the early '70s to escape Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, after breaking through with his feature debut, "Three Sad Tigers," which won Locarno's Golden Leopard in 1968.A leading figure of Chile's Cinema of Resistance movement, the politically-engaged Ruiz directed "Dialogues of the Exiled," inspired by playwright Bertolt Brecht's Refugee Conversations.Ruiz later sparked international recognition with films such as Catherine Deneuve starrer "Time Regained" based on Marcel Proust classic novel, and "Klimt, the biopic of Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, starring John Malkovich and "Genealogies of a Crime," which was nommed for a Golden Bear in Berlin.Ruiz was feted at Berlin with a Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution in 1997. Contact the Variety newsroom at news@variety.com