A Christmas Inventory

Miguel Gomes (b. 1972) began first as a film critic before directing a series of refreshingly eccentric short films that revealed his innate talents as a sensual visual stylist interested in an intensely image based narrative in which music plays an equal role to dialogue. Gomes’ early “musical comedies” offer important keys to his feature films by revealing the important inspiration of both musical cinema and the silent film to his uniquely playful and imaginative approach to narrative. The unique energy and puckish charm of Gomes’ little known debut, the Alice in Wonderland-meets-Jacque Rivette narrative puzzle, The Face That You Deserve, took the ludic tendencies of his cinema to a furthest extreme. The festival favorite My Beloved Month of August turned a new and important direction by responding to the “post-documentary” mode of innovative and unclassifiable non-fiction cinema championed by Costa and defined earlier by pioneering works such as Oliveira’s Rite of Spring (1963). —Harvard Film Archive