Tabu

About the film

'Tabu' begins in Lisbon with the elderly Portuguese lady Aurora, and her kind-hearted neighbour Pilar. When Aurora lands in hospital, she gives Pilar the name and address of a man, whom she asks her to find. Change of scene and style to Africa, and to a dialogue-free form with a truely poetic narrator's voice, which turns out to belong to Aurora's former lover. From here on, a fatal romance is unravelled in 1950s colonial Mozambique, which will grab your heart like few other films. For Miguel Gomes is a filmmaker who, just as his inspirators, Robert Flaherty, Murnau and Jacques Tourneur, lets the contradictions between the artificial and the real battle head-on in his films. While he departed from his fictional narrative frameworks for a documentary excursion in 'Our Beloved Month of August', 'Tabu' instead stands out as possibly the most overtly cinematic work this year. Or in other words, a romantic synthesis of sounds and images, which must be experienced in a cinema.