Aurora likes to frequent the casino, while Pilar spends her day doing good deeds. But turning back the clock fifty years unexpectedly brings the women together in an era when Portugal was still a major colonizer. At the 2012 Berlinale, this playful, original, subtly romantic picture took the Alfred Bauer Prize for most innovative work.
Profligate Aurora and kindhearted Pilar don’t have much in common. Then Gian Luca Ventura enters the picture, a mysterious man who changed Aurora’s life fifty years prior, and even Pilar’s mundane existence takes a new turn. What happened back in that Portuguese colony between the man and woman? And what role can be assigned to a crocodile as it passes mutely through the decades? The movie, whose title was taken from F. W. Murnau’s classic, draws its artistic sensibility in part from old movies, although it never directly references them. The director avoids following a particular style, seeking instead to recreate the essence of pictures from the 1920s and 1930s and taking inspiration from the tales of the older generation. The humor in the film is similarly unobtrusive and instinctive, yet clearly controlled by a strong vision, as is its genial and kitsch-free romanticism. The director uses the latter to toy with the audience and to look back on events that might or might not have happened. Everyone knows you shouldn’t believe everything you see in the movies. Nor should you underestimate the power of small deeds.
110 min / Black & white, 35 mm
Director Miguel Gomes
/ Screenplay Miguel Gomes, Mariana Ricardo
/ Dir. of Photography Rui Poças
/ Editor Telmo Churro, Miguel Gomes
/ Producer Sandro Aguilar, Luis Urbano
/ Production O Som e a Fúria
/ Cast Teresa Madruga, Laura Soveral, Ana Moreira, Henrique Espírito Santo, Carloto Cotta, Isabel Cardoso, Ivo Müller, Manuel Mesquita
/ Contact The Match Factory
Miguel Gomes (b. 1972, Lisbon) graduated from the Lisbon Film and Theater School, then he worked as a film critic for a variety of Portuguese media between 1996 and 2000. His short films screened at Locarno and Rotterdam (among others) and took awards from Oberhausen and Vila do Conde. He followed up his feature debut, The Face You Deserve (2004), with Our Beloved Month of August (2008), which was presented in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. Tabu, his third feature, premiered in this year’s Berlin’s competition.
The Match Factory
Domstrasse 60, 50668, Cologne
Germany
Phone: +49 221 539 7090
E-mail: [email protected]
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