改编自法国著名评论家克罗索夫斯基的同名小说.

丽薇娅（艾尔莎·泽贝斯坦 Elsa Zylberstein 饰）是衔着金汤匙出生的千金大小姐，他的父亲拥有一个庞大的企业，而丽薇娅将会是这个企业唯一的继承人。然而，丽薇娅是一个非常喜欢幻想的女孩，整日生活在虚幻的世界之中，对现实里的一切漠不关心。丽薇娅只希望有朝一日能够遇见一个白马王子，收获完美的爱情。
没想到，这名白马王子竟然真的出现了，他的名字叫做帕帕洛特（贝纳·纪欧多 Bernard Giraudeau 饰）。实际上，帕帕洛特接近丽薇娅只是为了她的财产而已，但在和她相处的过程中，帕帕洛特竟然真的爱上了这个单纯善良的女孩。虽然帕帕洛特改邪归正，但丽薇娅的亲戚们却不愿意相信他。

A serious young man of free spirit is forced by his surroundings to become rich at all costs. A group of blind children tries to open the eyes of the unbelievers to the Christian faith. Retired nuns who open a brothel, to pay the running costs of the convent. These rather ironic paradoxes turn this fairytale into a philosophical fable.

This three part French TV serial for children (alternate versions exist as a feature, Manoel's Destinies, and a 4 part Portuguese TV serial, Adventure in Madeira) is the favourite of many devotees of Raúl Ruiz. This is because it ties the enchantment and mystery of Lewis Carroll, Carlo Collodi and the Brothers Grimm to the filmmaker's experiments with narrative strategies and what he calls the pentaludic model of storytelling (where characters are thrown dice-like into combinations and situations governed by the play of Chance and Destiny).
But this film for children is among his most complex works, hard to grasp in its totality. Often it can seem an arbitrary collection of free-associational images and words, bordering on nonsense. But attentive viewers will have the strong sense that there is method behind this near-madness. Otherwise, it could never produce the intense emotions it so clearly offers. Ruiz's obsessions from film to film bind the fragments together – within a single work and across projects – and the emotion comes from the totally unexpected forking taken within a well-worn territorial map.
Part One presents us with three possible worlds. In each world, seven year-old Manoel has a different response to an entreaty from the outside world. Fittingly, in this film in which nothing coincides, the three parts of the story do not coincide with the three-episode structure (the trinity-form recurs frequently in Ruiz). In this case, past, present and future – the unholy trinity or Time en soi – is the film's very protagonist, variously called 'long ago' (Part One), 'now' (Part Two), and 'future' (Part Three). At the outset, this gives the story an apparent order before digressions take it over.
Part Two (the status of which is at first confusing since it begins after the three mini-narratives of the first Part and before the end of Episode One) is entitled 'The Picnic of Dreams'. Whilst vaguely 'keeping to the storyline', it veers off in many different directions, where the thematic coupling ordinary/special replaces the familiar/unknown dualism of Part One. (Each Part is guided by a thematic 'dominant', a pair of notions that tend to exchange their meanings as it progresses.)
Part Three (beginning in Episode Two), entitled 'The Little Chess-Champion', hands the (until now) off-screen voice-over narration to Manoel himself. He promises to tell his own story, but adds that it's 'a story that I made up in my distant childhood and that happens in the future'. The tone is less Baroque, more Gothic, as Ruiz explores the 'wonders of the night'. The filmmaker's obsession in this section concerns perception and the deciphering of secret signs and codes.

La Recta provincia est une sorte de secte conduite par des sorcières sur la plus grande île d'Amérique su Sud, berceau des mythes fondateurs de la culture chilienne.
Postproduction de la version cinématographique par la Cinémathèque française avec le soutien du Conseil national de la Culture et des Arts du Chili.

Jim is a small child who lives in an inn run by his parents. The arrival of a strange captain to the Island they live will trouble his existence and tip him into an universe of adventures.