The big names in cinema and this year’s most talked-about films
PORTUGAL, France, Germany, Switzerland | 125 minutes | 2015
?With his Arabian Nights trilogy, Miguel Gomes takes inspiration from the framing of the original saga to present a sweeping epic of tragic, farcical and surreal stories set in modern-day Portugal. In the fragmented and often violent tales of Sheherazade, the filmmaker saw an in for discussing the current economic crisis. The first, labour-themed volume — featuring technocrats with permanent erections, a talking rooster dragged into court and a union activist hospitalized inside a whale — is certainly the most openly political of the trilogy. Here, Gomes pits economic austerity against total, joyous creative freedom. The relationship between cinema, social issues and realism is examined through ever-shifting tones, aesthetics and stories in which imagination is less a means of escape than of resistance: it reveals rather than obscures, imposes neither a formula nor any particular reading and transforms the day-to-day into grist for multi-layered modern fables. A film fuelled by righteous anger, but also by a profound faith in cinema.
Sélectionné à la Quinzaine des Réalisateurs / Festival de Cannes 2015
No biography
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