Emptiness
Adolfo Ruiz | 8 min, 16mm | Edmonton
Adolfo Ruiz’s Emptiness is a surrealist exercise presenting one woman’s struggle with loneliness within a barren, and somewhat unsettling, urban landscape. A bicycle courier (Anna Primiani) begins her day within her cramped apartment and heads out with a bag full of small cubed packages. Each cube, we find, is given out to people waiting along the edge of an old dirt road surrounded by abandoned and dilapidated warehouses. Each of the consignees simply stare off down the distance of the road with a sense of expectance yet all appear to be surprised when the courier arrives with a mysterious message contained within each box; they all begin the same, “It was all a dream” followed by a specific discouraging remark giving a sense of why these people are waiting in this deserted area. Ruiz’s entry in this year’s tour is heavily influenced by the old avant garde masters who appeared in America and Europe in the 1930s and 40s (such as Maya Deren and Jacques Cocteau), and creates a haunting and oppressive mood about how one person deals with her own overpowering sense of loss.
Adolfo Ruiz was born in Barcelona, and studied art &design in Spain, England, and Canada. At the moment he maintains a multidisciplinary practice as a graphic designer, filmmaker, and teacher in the Design Studies program at MacEwan College. Emptiness is Adolfo’s third film, and his earlier projects consisted of rotoscoped animations which have been screened at several festivals including Kinofilm in Manchester England, and on ZED Television. Adolfo is the creative director at the Met Agency in Edmonton, and is currently making his next film, which will revisit one of his favorite themes: the therapeutic power of art.