Our Beloved Month of August

If you could say of Miguel Gomes’ inimitable feature début The Face You Deserve (2004) that it seemed to come from a distant planet, then Our Beloved Month of August – one of the real discoveries of the last year in film – is a UFO that landed in the Portuguese countryside.
There, August is the time of holidays and village feasts. Emigrants and city dwellers return to their birthplace. Our Beloved Month of August at first looks like a documentary about a film that doesn’t get made. The shots of a loafing crew taking part in the summer festivals, however, slowly changes to something else: the filming of the thick script about which the director Miguel Gomes is continually quarrelling with his producer. In that script, we follow 15-year-old Tania, the singer in her father’s band, and her amorous vicissitudes with her cousin. Against the background of Portuguese rural life with its Portuguese tear-jerkers, the relationship between Tania and her father turns out to be less than pure.
Miguel Gomes, of whom the festival has shown both his feature début and several short films, realised an idiosyncratic, often humorous film with documentary scenes, interviews and pure fiction. Gomes plays with the question of where fiction starts and lies stop, and in doing so makes use of the real difficulties faced in shooting his film. Or was that also all made up? (GT)