On January 2013, Cinema Nova celebrates its anniversary. 16 years programming films by independent directors whose atypical approach to filmmaking is often ignored by mainstream media and festivals, but whose career we’ve followed throughout… Some of them have been surprised to discover one of their films awarded at a first category festival, garnering unforeseen attention. Such is the case of Miguel Gomes, a young Portuguese director whose films were largely overlooked but whose work is finally being distributed in our country. It’s worth noting that his new film, “Tabu”, has been collecting prizes for the past year, notably at last year’s Berlin Festival and most recently at the Ghent Film Festival where it won the Grand Prix for Best Film. Currently released in 40 countries, there has been no shortage of praise for “Tabu”.
The reason we are giving this film such an unusually prominent spot in our program – and thus infringing our principle of only screening movies that don’t get shown elsewhere – is not to add our voice to the cries of exaltation that it is already receiving. In 2009, Cinema Nova was the only theatre in Belgium to release Miguel Gomes’s previous feature, “Our Beloved Month of August”. We were just as captivated by the sensibility and breadth of this seemingly simple film as we were appreciative of its approach and stylistic freedom. “Tabu” has impressed us just as much! Heavily endowed with a beautiful subject matter, a strong talent for improvisation whose only match is his talent for distancing himself from the script, Gomes visibly enjoys mixing up registers and genres and toying with ruptures and contrasts. Another arresting element transpires from his films: he does not assume the role of the director, but that of the young boy who leads his friends into his game. The collective dimension that rules the creation and production of his films is palpable to all. The last scene of “Our Beloved Month of August” reveals to the audience the sound engineer, Vasco Pimentel, next to the director who only wanted real sounds in the film. Since then, the pair got together again to endow “Tabu” with a rather particular sound treatment that pays tribute to silent film, consistent with the entirety of the film which draws lessons from past in order to better invent its own cinematic language.
The general enthusiasm roused by Gomes seems rather justified in our eyes, even if he could have expressed himself with the same amount of energy in his previous films. That is what prompted us to devote an entire retrospective to this filmmaker whose oeuvre is made up of six short films and three full-length films with diegetic sound!
The retrospective will last all of seven weeks (from January 10th to February 24th) and it will kick off in the presence of Miguel Gomes and a few members of his crew (January 10th and 11th).
And since music is a guiding element in Gomes’s cinema, the Nova will also organize three rather unique concerts (January 11th and 18th, and February 23rd) in order to celebrate the release of his new film and to enter his universe in what we hope will be the most alluring way imaginable.