In the heart of Portugal, amid the mountains, the month of August is abuzz with people and activity. Emigrants return home, set off fireworks, fight fires, sing karaoke, hurl themselves from bridges, hunt wild boar, drink beer, make babies. If the director and film crew had got straight to it and resisted the temptation to join in the festivities the synopsis would come down to: Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto follows the affective relationship between a father and daughter, and the daughters cousin, all musicians in a dance band. So, love and music then.
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… read more
Incrivel este filme! O tabu é outra obra de arte deste mestre do cinema Portguês! Parabéns Miguel
I've seen it at least 15 times (probably more, lost count). One of my favourite films ever.
Yes, I've got a DVD. Never seen it in the cinema - that would be absolutely amazing. My Portuguese professor showed it to me, and since then I watch it every other month or so. My boyfriend is just as in love with it as I am. The fact that we miss Portugal so much it hurts plays a big part too. We used to live there for a while. I can hardly remember seeing a film made with so much love for a country.
"'I don't want actors, I want people,' director Miguel Gomes tells an impatient producer in an early scene from his masterpiece Our Beloved
In honor of The Auteurs showing Miguel Gomes' Our Beloved Month of August for free in several countries as part of our Cannes Film Festival
