Northwest Film Forum

September 14-16, 2010
Director in attendance!

The films of Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes ooze amazement. The viewer never ceases to wonder what will happen next. His two feature films and six short films are jammed with bizarre themes, wild and meandering structures and unrestrained fantasy. They are willful in many ways, while all the time inventive, playful, frisky, disorderly, anarchical and absurd. Gomes ignores genre boundaries and conventional methods of story telling; he doesn't play by the rules and is fearless in using all the tricks and tools of the filmmaking trade. He confuses perceptions of time, artfully blurs the line between documenting and directing and takes unexpected turns within each film, jumping from one genre to the next. His films are fairytales, musicals, comedies and melodramas, all at the same time. Very often he deals with the process of coming of age, or more specifically, with the fear and denial of adolescent men becoming adults. And music always plays an important role.

These films are unique, and yet they are closely connected to the history of cinema. It's impossible to watch his films without picking up references to some of cinemas greatest masters, from Rivette, Minelli, Sirk, Demy, or fairytales, screwball comedies, animated films and silent movies. Gomes is always moving us along, jumbling us up, spacing us out in simple but ingenious ways, creating what every great filmmaker should: a singular informed and engaging voice.

“Gomes’ film offers its own, remarkable vision of an ‘expanded cinema’, a cinema of multiple levels interacting in space and time—freeing the viewers’ minds and letting their emotions roam. It is, indeed, a revelation.” —Adrian Martin, Rouge

Special thanks: Cristina Garza, FiGa Films; Haden Guest, Harvard Film Archives; Jose Torrealba, NEIAFF.
Special support provided by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences