The Portuguese director has returned from Cannes with the Best Director award under his arm. The success of ‘Grand Tour’ could be the prelude to directing an epic film that he has been planning for several years.
It is the highest award that a Portuguese film has ever received in Cannes: if the inclusion of ‘Grand Tour‘of Miguel Gomesin the official selection of the Palme d’Or was already a great achievement, the best director award It is the icing on the cake and the crowning of the career of this 52-year-old director, a regular at the main festivals during the last decade and a half with films such as ‘Taboo‘ (2012) and the trilogy of ‘Arabian Nights‘ (2015).
“Winning is an even bigger prize”
“You feel many things at the same time,” the director tells ‘Euronews’. “It is rare for a Portuguese film to be nominated, winning is an even bigger award.”
Miguel Gomes grew up watching Portuguese cinema and he fully identifies with it: “Portuguese cinema has its history, since the 60s, and that gives it an identity that is sometimes discussed internally, because it is said that Portuguese cinema is difficult.”
“Since I was little, I got used to seeing portuguese cinema Already thinking ‘is it possible to do this in Portugal‘. That was very shocking and decisive for me. “Maybe I’m saying something heretical, but I feel a greater sense of belonging to Portuguese cinema than to the country itself.”
‘Grand Tour’ is the result of a long journey
‘Grand Tour’, which the filmmaker considers “a classic adventure film”, is the result of two different but complementary processes: on the one hand, the filming that Gomes, together with a very small crew, carried out during a long trip through Asia in the first months of 2020before the pandemic will force them to postpone their plans (the part in China was filmed in 2022, once restrictions are lifted).
The journey began “without there even being a script for the movie,” he says. Instead, andFilming took place in 2023 with the actors in the studiowhere everything was already planned and a team of more than 100 people worked: “The studio is the cinematographic space par excellence,” he says.
From the combination of these two concepts the film is born: “There are two possibilities in the cinema“, he says. “Record the world as we know it, put a camera in a certain place and record what we have in front of us or, on the other hand, invent the world: invent a sunset or a sunrise in a windowless space, in a studio.
The story takes place in Asia in 1918, “but this film is much more than the story, because it was a great challenge to film it,” explains Gomes.
It all begins with a man, a British official in Burma, waiting for his fiancée at the dock. He panicked, decides to flee to Singaporewhere he receives a telegram from his fiancée telling him that she is arriving.
He flees again and crosses several countries, always with her on his trail. The second part of the film tells the story from the woman’s point of view. The result is a film in which the (deliberate) contrast between the period film and the images of today’s Asia.
Next project: filming ‘The Hinterlands’
‘Grand Tour’ will not be released in major markets until after the summer. For the moment, the critical success and award won at Cannes They could serve Gomes to finance his long-awaited project of bringing to the big screen ‘The sertones’of Euclides da Cunhaa very difficult book to translate to film, since it is both a war chronicle and a botany treatise.
First published in 1902, the book is set in the state of Bahia (Brazil) at the end of the 19th century and portrays the conflict between the Brazilian Army and the followers of the prophet António Conselheirowho opposed the establishment of the Republic.
This is a project that Miguel Gomes has been working on since before embarking on ‘Grand Tour’ and which has been postponed due to several vicissitudes: Firstly, for the arrival of Jair Bolsonaro to power, since his Government has almost completely paralyzed film financing. In second place, due to the Covid pandemic. With both problems overcome and financing talks resumed, the film finally seems on track to be made.
Journalist • Ricardo Figueira
Video editor • Bruno Filipe Figueiredo Da Silva
