Miguel Gomes

Francisco, behave! I Know it's your birthday, you are thirty now, it's carnival, you've dressed as a cowboy for the school party and you are surrounded by kids you hate. But that's no reason to be so annoying... Francisco, repeat after me: "Up to your 30's you have the face God has given you. After that, you get the face you deserve". (imdb)

Deep in the Portuguese mountains, the population and its activities swell during the month of August. The people come home, set off fireworks, fight fires, perform karaoke, jump off the bridge, hunt wild boar, drink beer, make children. Also, Our Beloved Month Of August follows the romantic relations of the father, the daughter and her cousin, musicians in a dance hall music group. Love and music, then. (Quinzaine des réalisateurs)

With no parents, tutors, nor any watch in sight, a girl and two boys spend some summer days. There's an amateur rugby match, a party, a trip to the beach; and also a slight romantic tension, some three-way kissing and half-joke, half-serious fights.... (KG)

25th of December, in the eighties. The family gets together in grandparents' house. When I was twelve I dreamt with putting in motion the static pictures of the crèche. With this film I tried to do the same with the memories of my cousins and relatives, with that house and with those rituals. It's a fake documentary and a fake animation film, a semi-fiction about children who go to war, play music, and take over. (Gomes)

With some slight surrealism, a certain indolent eroticism, and the brutal background of class struggle (as in the early Pasolini), 31 (the number of the tennis court from which the leading couple embarks on an adventure, with just a supermarket cart filled with tennis balls as their luggage) establishes some improbable connections on the way to sketch, perhaps, a critique of another probable and fertile relation: the one between cinema and history. (KG)

A troubadour walks the streets of St. Francis of Assisi hometown, singing and playing the Song of Brother Sun or Song of the Creatures, written by St. Francis back in the winter of 1224....

Aurora, an elderly Portugese woman and her Cap Verdean housekeeper live next door to Pilar, who has made it her aim in life to do good. Not that she receives any gratitude for her efforts - and certainly not from the notoriously mistrustful Aurora, who prefers to spend her remaining years losing her meagre savings at Estoril casino. When the old lady dies, Pilar discovers among her belongings a letter addressed to an old lover. (mubi.com)

Redemption takes the guise of an archival film, presenting four stories in four countries and time periods: the 1975 Portuguese countryside, 2011 Milan, 2012 Paris and 1977 Leipzig. (viff)

Some of the chapters from Arabian Nights are adapted to a modern Portugal in this epic. (imdb)

Some of the chapters from Arabian Nights are adapted to a modern Portugal in this epic. (imdb)

The third part of a trilogy about Portugal.

A 20 year old young man asks some kids if he can play football with them. They think it's weird and ask him how old is he. When he answers «I'm ten» he is laughed at. But he is going to find another group of kids who are different, just like him... (imdb)

Exactly what it's announced: the screen of the famous console video game and a dance with no music, to the fragile rhythm of replays. (imdb)

A 2008 short made in accompaniment with Our Beloved Month of August, documenting Gomes's and his crew's hapless search, during 2007's carnival, for one of Arganil's most storied and elusive characters (who does, in fact, ultimately appear as an interviewee/player in the finished film). (DVD talk)

Follows Crista, Carloto and João who are building an airy greenhouse for butterflies in the garden and share household routines, but they are not the only ones. (imdb)

Edward, civil servant, flees fiancee Molly on their wedding day in Rangoon, 1917. His travels replace panic with melancholy. Molly, set on marriage, amused by his escape, trails him across Asia.