Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto

Miguel Gomes's Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto (Our Beloved Month of August) opened at Cannes Directors' Fortnight in 2008 and won the Portuguese Golden Globe for Best Film. The film consolidated Gomes, after his earlier The Face You Deserve, as the most internationally significant Portuguese director of his generation; his subsequent work (Tabu (2012), Arabian Nights trilogy (2015), Grand Tour (2024)) would extend the formal experimentation this film established.

The premise is that Gomes was unable to fund the original fiction screenplay he had developed, and adapted instead by spending the summer making a documentary about the bands that play August festivals in the mountainous interior of Portugal, Alvares, Arganil, the small towns of the Serra do Açor where the diaspora returns each August for music, fireworks and family. The first hour and a half of the film is largely documentary footage of these bands and the villages around them. Then, slowly, fictional characters begin to walk through the documentary footage; by the second hour the film is a quasi-incest melodrama between a young singer (Sónia Bandeira) and her older musician cousin (Fábio Oliveira) embedded entirely in the surviving documentary infrastructure.

The film's structural masterstroke (its refusal to choose between documentary and fiction, its commitment to the fact that summer-festival music is itself partly fictional) produced one of the most genuinely strange and joyful European films of its decade. Gomes's later work has been more austere; this remains his warmest.