Shot in five languages (one of them imaginary), On Top of the Whale is a richly conceived satire of the ethnographic practices that the West has perpetuated on the rest of the world. Reversing the pattern of his own exile, Chilean-born filmmaker Ruiz situates his tale in South America as a European anthropological expedition heads to remote reaches of Patagonia to study a tribe of Indians that has dwindled down two surviving members who speak a strange language. With its title referencing the bestiary conjured up by Borges in his Book of Imaginary Beings, the film is filled with Alekan’s audacious visual effects, which parallel the uncanny character of this primitive culture in which “one is an even number” and language is shifting and changeable, like life.