Our Beloved Month of August / Contemporasian

I'll have more to say after I've seen Miguel Gomes's Our Beloved Month of August. In the meantime, here's a lovely image from the film which has received rapturous reviews. From all indications Gomes would appear to be a major emerging director of the Portuguese New Wave, if there is such a thing (Pedro Costa, João Pedro Rodrigues).

UPDATE 9/9: Our Beloved Month of August more than lives up to its advance praise. Roughly the first half of the film, shot in and around the annual music festival in Arganil, takes the form of a documentary about the festival, the local residents and visitors, the natural beauty of the mountainous region, and Gomes’s inability, due to lack of financing, to make the fiction feature he originally planned. After we’ve been immersed in the leisurely pace of the music and conversations for some time, a narrative suddenly begins to emerge, performed by actors who had previously appeared to be “real people” talking about their lives. However, the film’s structure is built on layers of ambiguity between what is fiction and nonfiction, and the soundtrack involves a constant layering of natural sounds, conversations and bits of music recorded at various times. If I’m not mistaken, there is even an audio clip from a film by the late Portuguese filmmaker João César Monteiro, reciting a speech as his screen alter ego João de Deus. Gomes himself appears from time to time as the director of the film within the film, in playfully scripted conversations with his producer, his soundman, and in one instance a delightful scene where a couple of girls try to audition for parts in the film. It’s all shot in a beautiful, often long-take style. The result is a unique hybrid of music doc, travelogue, domestic drama and personal essay about the process of making a movie.

Madam Butterfly

Another essential screening next week in New York is MoMA's Contemporasian program of short films by four of the greatest contemporary Asian directors. Included are two films I've seen previously, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's A Letter to Uncle Boonmee and Jia Zhangke's Cry Me a River, and two others I'm especially eager to see, Tsai Ming-Liang's Madam Butterfly and Hong Sang-Soo's Lost in the Mountains.