Miguel Gomes is a Portuguese filmmaker whose four shorts and three feature films that generally share an interest in formal games. His feature films loosely adhere to two-part structures, not unlike the occasionally referenced film, The Wizard of Oz (1939), and are often in dialogue with the medium and its past.
The Face You Deserve (2004) is a musical comedy riff on Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, where a bout of measles results in a meta-cinema dream about growing up. Our Beloved Month of August (2008) is a freewheeling narrative centred on a touring band during Portugal’s festival season, which eventually focuses on a single love story. His latest film, Tabu (2012), jumps from a melancholy look at contemporary Lisbon to one character’s colonial backstory, which is told through a reinvention of cinema history. Tabu won the Alfred Bauer Prize for Artistic Innovation and the FIPRESCI Jury Prize at the 2012 Berlinale.
We talked briefly with Miguel about his films’ structures, production, and themes during the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival from our studio space hosted by Onsite [at] OCAD U.
Our interview with Miguel Gomes was a feature interview in the seventh monthly issue of The Seventh Art as a “video magazine.” It was released in September 2012 as the first published interview from our Toronto International Film Festival coverage from that month. Other TIFF 2012 interviews on video from that year include Thomas Vinterberg, Margarethe von Trotta, Ben Wheatley, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Ernie Gehr, Costa-Gavras, João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata, Matías Piñeiro, Rodney Ascher & Tim Kirk, Peter Mettler, and William Vega.
