Tabu

Miguel Gomes' Tabu won the Silver Bear (Alfred Bauer Prize) and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival 2012, the same festival where Gomes had premiered Our Beloved Month of August three years earlier. The two awards established Gomes as one of the central figures in twenty-first-century Portuguese cinema alongside Pedro Costa and João Pedro Rodrigues.

The film's title is a direct reference to F. W. Murnau's last film Tabu (1931), and the second half of Gomes' film borrows Murnau's two-part structural device of Paradise and Paradise Lost. Gomes' film is itself organised in two parts (Paradise Lost first and Paradise second) with the second half shot silent (with voice-over narration only), an unusual structural choice that became one of the most discussed aspects of its release. The film is shot in 35mm by Rui Poças in Academy ratio (4:3), in black and white.

The cast includes Teresa Madruga, Laura Soveral, Ana Moreira, Carloto Cotta and Henrique Espírito Santo. The Mozambique sequences were shot near the colonial-era Gorongosa region and around Mount Tabu (Tabuandé). The film engaged seriously with Portuguese colonial nostalgia as a subject (an unusually direct engagement for Portuguese cinema of the period) and is widely credited with opening the way for the new wave of contemporary Portuguese feature production that includes Arabian Nights (Gomes' follow-up), São Jorge and O Ornitólogo.