[1] Made during Ruiz's most prolific period of filmmaking in exile and shortly after his first return to Chile since the 1973 military coup, the film stars a primarily French cast including Hugues Quester, Anne Alvaro and Melvil Poupaud.

The film is generally considered to be one of Ruiz's best works and exemplifies several recurring themes and motifs of the director's style, including neo-Baroque narrative and cinematography, depth of field, childhood, navigation, dreams, and schizophrenia.

City of Pirates follows a disconsolate young woman called Isidore through multiple episodes of seemingly disconnected events and narrative points that, in themselves, operate with an allegorical and dreamlike logic.

"[3] However, Goddard argues that the film rather makes "use of particular surrealist procedures for the specific purpose of destabilising normative narrative forms and opening up cinematic potentials beyond the telling of a single, organic story, knowable in its entirety.

"[3] Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader called the film "seductive" and "confounding", writing: "It's useless to describe the plot, which flows with perfect dream logic from one mysterious episode to the next".

[7] Dennis Schwartz of Ozus' World Movie Reviews gave the film a grade of "B+", and referred to it as "hypnotic, seductive and unique, but it was too confounding for me to feel comfortable with something that follows only dream logic.