Arabian Nights

The latest from Miguel Gomes (Tabu, Our Beloved Month of August) Arabian Nights (As mil e uma noites) is probably this year’s most ambitious cinematic undertaking, and the most talked about film experience of the last Cannes Film Festival. Arabian Nightsuses the framing device from the original Arabian Nights of the beautiful young Scheherazade telling tale after tale in order to keep her murderous husband from killing her—but that’s where the similarities end. Over three features, Gomes channels the current struggles of economically depressed Portugal through an assortment of tales that range from farcical yarns to grounded accounts of social issues.

Volume 1 – The Restless One: After opening with overlapping documentary portraits of a shipyard and a wasp-exterminator, the director appears on screen, contemplating his overly ambitious undertaking. From here, Gomes spins a satirical tale about the financial powers-that-be preying on Portugal’s vulnerability. Next up is the comic story of the role a rooster plays in a local election, followed by a sobering triptych of interviews with unemployed citizens.

Volume 2 – The Desolate One: The volume's opening chapter is about a criminal on the run. In “The Tears of the Judge,” a public trial becomes a mockery, with the testimony implicating everyone in attendance. Finally, The Desolate One ends on an exhilarating note, with a hugely entertaining story about a dog named Dixie who’s passed between owners, familiarizing us with the inhabitants of a working-class apartment building.

Volume 3 – The Enchanted One: Having escaped the palace, Scheherazade explores a seaside landscape where she encounters, among others, a “wind genie” and a daft suitor. This segues into a documentary-style exploration of the working-class sport of chaffinch singing competitions. Movingly and unexpectedly, the last gesture of Arabian Nights is to scale back its scope and provide a disarmingly modest and poignant grace note on which one of contemporary cinema’s new masterpieces can close.' (Vancouver Film Festival Catalogue)

Miguel Gomes was born in Lisbon in 1972. He studied at the Lisbon Film and Theatre School and between 1996 and 2000 worked as a film critic in Portugal. He directed several short films that were screened all over the world and went on to win awards in Oberhausen, Belfort and Vila do Conde. The Face You Deserve (2004) was his first feature film. In 2008, his feature-length film Our Beloved Month of August was shown in Cannes’ Directors' Fortnight. His next film, Tabu, was selected in the Berlin Film Festival Competition in 2012, where it won the Alfred Bauer and FIPRESCI awards. It was subsequently distributed in the UK by New Wave Films. Arabian Nights, a three-part feature film inspired by the tales told by Scheherazade and the events that occurred in Portugal in 2013 and 2014, premiered in the 2015 edition of the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes.

Filmography

Feature-length Films

2015    ARABIAN NIGHTS, Volume 1: THE RESTLESS ONE (As mil e uma noites, Volume 1, O Inquieto)

ARABIAN NIGHTS, Volume 2: THE DESOLATE ONE (As mil e uma noites, Volume 2, O Desolado)

ARABIAN NIGHTS, Volume 3: THE ENCHANTED ONE (As mil e uma noites, Volume 3, O Encantado)

2012    TABU

2008    OUR BELOVED MONTH OF AUGUST (AQUELE QUERIDO MÊS DE AGOSTO)

2004    A CARA QUE MERECES (THE FACE YOU DESERVE)

Short Films

2013 REDEMPTION

2006    CANTICO DE CRIATURAS (CANTICLE OF ALL CREATURES)

2002    KALKITOS

2002    TRINTA E UM (31 MEANS TROUBLE)

2000    INVENTÁRIO DE NATAL (A CHRISTMAS INVENTORY)

1999    ENTRETANTO (MEANWHILE)

'...the single greatest new work unleashed at Cannes in 2015... Arabian Nights retains a core, inimitable stylistic unity, which instils even the most guarded spectator with an irrepressible desire not just to watch cinema, but to live it.'
Senses of Cinema

★★★★

'By turns surreal, giddy, erotic, didactic, righteous, exhausting, boundlessly creative and a thousand and one other things, this shape-shifting colossus feels as diverse as the people of Portugal themselves.'

David Erlich Time Out New York

★★★★

'Arabian Nights veers from the naturalistic to the fantastical, from documentary to fiction...this is daring, magical film-making.'

Jamie Graham, Total Film

'A film unlike any other, part social realism, part magical realism.'

Kate Muir, The Times

'The really outré attraction of the festival, in the end, was in Directors’ Fortnight – the six-hour, three-partArabian Nights from Portuguese experimenter Miguel Gomes. This is not an adaptation of the old tales, but an attempt to engage with Portugal’s economic crisis, using Scheherazade as a structuring device. But this doesn’t begin to convey the inspired oddity of Gomes’s epic, a barely categorisable encyclopedia of a film. It takes in documentary, mock-documentary (with non-professionals playing themselves), Brechtian theatre, and cod-exotic sequences featuring camels, genies, princesses and even an exploding whale.

It was the most authentically crazy film on show here, the biggest splash of true innovation in Cannes, and an unmissable art event.

Jonathan Romney, The Observer

'Brilliant...every minute is sensational.'

Kaleem Aftab, The Independent

Vive le Gomes…’

David Jenkins, Little White Lies

‘Truly remarkable. ‘A sprawling, angry, comical extemporization on the state of Portugal - a gallimaufry of personal testimony and imaginative mythologizing.

One of the must-sees of the year.'

Nick James, Sight and Sound

‘The film is hugely entertaining and quite magical in places.’

Jonathan Romney, Screen

‘The two masterworks that defined Cannes 2015 were Miguel Gomes’s wild and sprawling Arabian Nights and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour.

Arabian Nights is an up-to-the-minute rethinking of what it means to make a political film today. It is hard to imagine a more generous or radical approach to these trouble times – one that honors its fantasy life as much as its hard realities.’

Dennis Lim, Film Comment

‘For all the film’s politics, Arabian Nights can also be whimsical, swooningly romantic, inspiring, fascinating, or deeply sad.’

Oliver Lyttelton, The Playlist / Indiewire

‘Fascinating even in its misfires, this sprawling and fantastical document of the country’s plight in the wake of the global financial crisis confirms Gomes as one of the most exhilaratingly inventive filmmakers working today.’

Giovanni Marchini Camia, The Film Stage

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