Miguel Gomes between the lived and imagined – RTP

“The Thousand and One Nights” by Miguel Gomes, it is proposed to mention the Portuguese this by calling the stories of Scheherazade – Volume 1 arrives now the rooms:. the second and third will premiere in a few weeks

Miguel Gomes (center) staging the drama filming Portugal – a film about our present

 Which means shooting the gift of a country?
 
 

 How to shoot the gift of Portugal?
 

 
 

 What are the dominant images of our present and how to escape its effects standardization glances and thoughts?
 

 
 

 Probably, these are questions that we would like to find formulated in many Portuguese films … In any case, “The Thousand and One Nights” by Miguel Gomes, is a project that integrates, discusses and recasts in defiance to even thematic and narrative time that ultimately reaches the rooms.
 

 
 
 

It is, of course, a challenge to consumer habits. We are indeed facing a film in three parts that work proposes a more or less extended time (the second part will arrive on 24 September and the third on October 1). The first volume now released – with the subtitle “The Restless” – acts as a range of experiences keen to underline the tensions inherent in the central idea of ​​the project: look for realism social crises through a wandering the labyrinths of the Thousand and One Nights the stories of Scheherazade (played by Crista Taylor).

 
 

 What country is this, then? Let’s say it is a territory, between the lived and the imagined , in which we discover the drama of unemployment, but also the tribulations of a exterimador wasps … the ritual of the first bath of the year, but also the incantatory power of stories of Scheherazade …
 

 
 

 It is significant that, at one point in the opening of this vol. 1, Miguel Gomes to act out himself as a director-in-flight … I do not want, can not or do not know your movie and therefore tries to escape his own team – are tastefully burlesque moments that ultimately, we are told that there is nothing automatic in the decision to shoot / play the deepest wounds of our much-touted ‘crisis’.
 

 
 

 Hence the singular experience that “The Arabian Nights” involves developing and sharing. We are thus not in the territory of audiovisual news or in the country of telenovelas formatted. None of this: this is a cinematic journey able to question, at once, the borders of our real and cinematic work for the draw, redraw and at home. Cinema ours, visceral.
 

     

John Lopes Critical

published 19:09 – August 26 ’15