Film Screenings / Programs / Series
THE FILMS OF MIGUEL GOMES
September 3 – September 12
With just two features and half a dozen shorts to his name, Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes has established himself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary cinema, developing an exhilaratingly original, truly head-scratching, and inexplicably beguiling approach to filmmaking. Combining the meta-fictional gamesmanship and mystery of Jacques Rivette with the blurring of documentary and narrative modes that has proven a favored (and highly productive) strategy of many of today’s most gifted filmmakers (Pedro Costa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ulrich Seidl, and others), Gomes has confidently staked out a territory all his own. His most recent feature film, OUR BELOVED MONTH OF AUGUST is truly something new under the sun, a category-exploding whatsit that’s nevertheless so seductive and effortlessly compelling from moment to moment that its wanderings between different cinematic realms (conceived as a fictional film, it transformed itself into a documentary on summer music festivals in rural Portugal when the funding fell through, only to grope its way back towards fiction during production) ultimately seem almost irrelevant. This summer, we will present the New York theatrical premiere run of this remarkable film, alongside screenings of Gomes’s earlier shorts and debut feature – a great opportunity to catch up all at once with the work of a truly original cinematic sensibility. Very special thanks to Miguel Gomes; Sandro Fiorin, Cristina Garza, and Alex Garcia (Figa Films); Adam Sekuler (Northwest Film Forum); and Haden Guest (Harvard Film Archive).
