One of 2024’s most beguiling films as the relationship woes of a European couple bring us all over colonised Asia, but the always deceptive Gomes plays with time as an artificial construct, celebrating modern Asia and traditional Asian arts with hints of Jia Zhangke and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
A faltering work of great ambition, or an artistic triumph bogged down by chronic unevenness, Gomes brings to it a plethora of aesthetical styles and nonchalant attitude towards film form to deliver a biting satire on Portugal’s politics, economy and culture.
An artistic and personal attempt to produce a film during the Covid pandemic, this meta-cine piece is calm and poetic, told via a playful reverse-chrono structure.
This quaint self-reflective piece by Oliveira doesn’t always work, but it is an introspective glimpse into the filmmaker’s mind, his life experiences and awareness of his mortality.
Way too sprawling and loosely-episodic to work effectively, the Portuguese auteur nevertheless gives us a rather cerebral docu-fictive, music-infused meta-film centering on the vibrancy and eccentricity of a small town blessed with a strong festive spirit.
An artistic attempt at expressing and exorcising the ghosts of childishness in adulthood, but Gomes’ feature debut left me cold and unbothered.
A masterfully thought-out and dreamlike meta-fiction by a remarkable talent of Portuguese cinema—it is both visually arresting and poetically told, and will leave you in a trance.
This extraordinary Portuguese docu-fiction is best described as Malick meets Parajanov—a transcendental portrait of what it means to navigate the personal, the familial and the ancestral as a lineage of lived experiences.
The psychological and hallucinatory strains of war befall a young Portuguese soldier lost in the jungles of Mozambique in WWI.
Master of light and shadow, Pedro Costa returns with another visually-hypnotic elegy about the disenfranchised and their unbearable solitude.
Eternality Tan 