Grand Tour

Miguel Gomes's Grand Tour won the Best Director prize at Cannes 2024, Gomes's largest international prize at that point. The film consolidated Gomes, after Tabu and the Arabian Nights trilogy, as one of the most distinctive Portuguese auteurs of his generation. The production, partly delayed by the pandemic, ran across approximately four years and included documentary fieldwork in seven Asian countries.

Rangoon, 1918. Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a British civil servant of the colonial Burma administration, panics on the eve of his wedding and flees across Asia, pursued, with increasing determination, by the fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaiate) he left behind. The film moves across multiple Asian countries (Burma, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, China, Tibet) with an unusual structural device: present-day documentary footage of each location is intercut with the period drama, the two registers commenting on each other across decades.

The film operates simultaneously as period romance, colonial-encounter narrative, and sustained essay-film about memory of empire. Gomes's collaboration with cinematographers Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and Rui Poças produced one of the most distinctive visual registers of recent European art-cinema. The Cannes-Best-Director prize was widely received as overdue recognition for Gomes; the film extended his continuing reach in international art-cinema circuits while his work has remained largely outside mainstream Portuguese-cinema commercial reception.