In addition to cinema and distribution, the institution carries out education, research and knowledge transfer.
The film starts by being premiered at prestigious Kino Arsenal in a Miguel Gomes Retrospective, from May the 27th to the 30th, which also comprehends his first feature THE FACE YOU DESERVE and his shorts CANTICAL OF ALL CREATURES, PRE-EVOLUTION SOCCER’S ONE MINUTE DANCE AFTER A GOLDEN GOAL IN THE MASTER LEAGUE, KALKITOS, THIRTY ONE, CHRISTMAS INVENTORY and MEANWHILE.
In her review, titled In Wonderland – The Films of Miguel Gomes Christine Sievers, from Arsenal, mentions: “One can’t stop wondering and has no idea what is happening to oneself when watching the films of the Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes. His (...) films offer bizarre topics, wild, meandering forms and an irrepressible imagination. They are in many respects idiosyncratic, inventive, playful, frolicsome, disorderly, anarchic, and absurd. Gomes ignores genre borders and narrative conventions. His films are fairy-tale, musical, comedy, and melodrama all in one. One of the greatest talents of Portuguese cinema.”
OUR BELOVED MONTH OF AUGUST, a co-production between O Som e a Fúria and Shellac Sud, is a film about what it means to live in the heart of Portugal, amid the mountains. The month of August is abuzz with people and activity. Emigrants return home, set off fireworks, fight fires, sing karaoke, hurl themselves from bridges, hunt wild boar, drink beer, make babies. If the director and film crew had got straight to it and resisted the temptation to join in the festivities the synopsis would come down to: OUR BELOVED MONTH OF AUGUST follows the affective relationship between a father and daughter, and the daughter’s cousin, all musicians in a dance band.