August 24th: OUR BELOVED MONTH OF AUGUST (Miguel Gomes, 2008)

A film production crew descends on a yearly music festival in the heart of Portugal, and become intertwined with the real and imagined lives of the locals.

Despite having a small film industry and little in the way of big commercial releases, the cinema of Portugal is considered one of the most exciting of the new century. Director Miguel Gomes came onto the scene after graduating from the Lisbon Theatre and Film School, and after a stint as a film critic made a series of innovative shorts revealing himself as a new kind of cinematic prankster.

Gomes's debut feature The Face You Deserve was little-seen but applauded for its genre-bending and enthusiasm, and his follow-up was to take him deeper into Portugal's rural area for a love story set against local cultural traditions and the August fiesta season. When funding was pulled close to the start of production, Gomes opted to push ahead anyway, using cheaper 16mm film stock and paring his crew down to 5 people.

After arriving in the village of Arganil, Gomes had a two-pronged approach: document the musical performances at the festival, and seek out colorful people to feature and perhaps construct a story around. The important rule the director set is that everything would be on camera, including the whole crew and their equipment and the discussion of their modus operandi, the film reflecting back on itself.

When Gomes returned to Lisbon to sort through his footage, he saw connections between some of the locals and their stories to his original script, and rewrote it with his collaborators to better fit the existing material. The crew returned the following summer and enlisted the previously-shot individuals to act out their written counterparts. This process is not seamless; instead the transformation, again, becomes part of the film.

In addition to the blending of documentary and narrative filmmaking, Gomes plays with fantasy vs. reality and purportedly drew inspiration from works such as The Wizard Of Oz. His approach has drawn comparisons to French New Wave pioneer Jacques Rivette, as well as his fellow countrymen  directors Manoel de Oliveira and Pedro Costa.

Our Beloved Month of August premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Directors' Fortnight sidebar, winning much critical praise, and went on to win awards at the Vienna, São Paolo, and Buenos Aires Independent film festivals. It announced Gomes as a new star of international cinema, and he would follow with Tabu in 2012.

Running time is approx. 2.5 hours.