The 13th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival opens with the Greek premiere of Miguel Gomes’ latest film, Grand Tour, which won the Award for Best Director at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. To mark this new work by the bold Portuguese director, the festival also presents two of his key works: Tabu (2012) and Our Beloved Month of August (2008).
Regarding Grand Tour, Élodie Tamayo writes in Cahiers du cinéma:
“The re-creations in studio alternate with real-life captures. The images, shot on 16mm, sometimes in black-and-white, sometimes in color, evoke memories of Murnau, Sternberg, Mizoguchi, Fellini, Ruiz, and Weerasethakul. A cappella songs, karaoke on the mic, and old gramophones reverberate. We are awake. We sleep. The fades to black serve as heavy eyelids, like a tunnel where consciousness slips away.”
The screenings will be held in the presence of Rui Poças, the cinematographer and long-time collaborator of Gomes’ films.
Program curation: Nepheli Gambade
Miguel Gomes (Lisbon, 1972) is a distinguished Portuguese filmmaker, known for his innovative narrative approach and hybrid cinematic style. His sixth feature, Grand Tour, premiered in the Competition Section at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Best Director Award. Gomes began his career with short films before making his feature debut with The Face You Deserve (2004). His subsequent works, including Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto (2008) and Tabu (2012)—which won the Alfred Bauer and FIPRESCI awards at the Berlin Film Festival—highlight his unique ability to blend fiction and documentary, exploring themes of personal and collective memory, history, and identity with a nostalgic and playful tone. His ambitious Arabian Nights trilogy (2015), with its fragmented narrative structure, reinvents classic stories, while The Tsugua Diaries (2021), a collaboration with Maureen Fazendeiro, continues to experiment with storytelling conventions. Retrospectives of his work have been presented in countries including Austria, Italy, Spain, Germany, and the United States. A graduate of the Lisbon School of Film and Theatre, Gomes is also a former film critic.
