Miguel Gomes: ​‘This film is like a secret door that I entered’

Ara­bi­an Nights is less a movie than it is a full blown event. Three films made across an entire year with the aim of chron­i­cling the sour effects of aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures imposed on the pop­u­la­tion of Por­tu­gal, its direc­tor Miguel Gomes sank his soul into mak­ing some­thing equal parts poet­ry and politics.

He first earned acclaim for his 2008 fea­ture, Our Beloved Month of August, which clev­er­ly mixed fic­tion and doc­u­men­tary while telling of rur­al folk tra­di­tions in Por­tu­gal. His fol­low-up, Tabu, a rhap­sod­ic, roman­tic melo­dra­ma viewed through all man­ner of obscure and fan­ci­ful angles, made him a house­hold name among cinephiles. We met the direc­tor to dis­cuss how he found the sto­ries that end­ed up being includ­ed in Ara­bi­an Nights and how he was able to make a per­son­al con­nec­tion with its subjects.

LWLies: What was the response like to the film in Por­tu­gal? Did peo­ple get it?

Gomes: I don’t even know if I got it. I don’t know if there’s one way to get this film. I guess that the film is so long because it has so many things in it that every­one who is going to see the film can either get it or not get it in very dif­fer­ent ways. But I would say is I was a lit­tle more inter­est­ed this time because the film was com­plete­ly con­nect­ed with Por­tu­gal and with the present. Every­one suf­fered with what hap­pened there in the last few years, so I was curi­ous about whether the Por­tuguese would be more curi­ous to see the film.

Why is this film a tril­o­gy and not one, six hour film?

I guess it would be much more dif­fi­cult to show it in the­atres, but I didn’t divide the film in three parts because of the box office. Of course, it’s an issue when show­ing the film, but I real­ly thought when I was edit­ing the film that I had three very dif­fer­ent cin­e­mato­graph­ic expe­ri­ences. For me, you need to reset your mind in between each view­ing. But there are some peo­ple who tell me, ​‘No, it’s much bet­ter to see the movies in one go.’ I explain to them that, for me, it’s like hav­ing lunch three times. You fin­ish one lunch and then you can­not digest because you’re already eat­ing anoth­er one. This inter­rup­tion between each vol­ume was part of the edit­ing. Each film is autonomous, even though they have a dia­logue with the oth­er parts. But my rea­son­ing was that, not the com­mer­cial side.

The film is stri­dent­ly anti-aus­ter­i­ty, but did you have any polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion to the film?

Yeah, I did. About this ques­tion, the polit­i­cal issue: Por­tu­gal is pret­ty much divid­ed 50/50. We had two elec­tions in the last few months, and you can see that between the left and the right it’s pret­ty much split down the mid­dle. As every­thing went more extreme in the last few years, people’s per­son­al pol­i­tics are becom­ing more extreme. The right went so far to the right that, for instance, for the first time after the Por­tuguese Rev­o­lu­tion in 1974, we had an agree­ment between the Com­mu­nists and the Ecol­o­gists and the Social­ists for sup­port­ing a Social­ist gov­ern­ment. The Com­mu­nists nev­er, ever want­ed to do this until now, and this is a result of how extreme the right-wing pol­i­cy was in recent years. It oblig­ed peo­ple to make new alliances in the Left.

Do you feel that this a good thing?

For me this is good news. I don’t know how it will end. I’m not always opti­mistic, but let’s see. But I remem­ber one guy, after a Q&A in Por­tu­gal, say­ing, ​‘I think you’re a good direc­tor, but you should be bet­ter informed about real­i­ty. You’re a good direc­tor, so you should make good films, not this bull­shit.’ He was obvi­ous­ly sym­pa­thet­ic with the gov­ern­ment, and so he was mad that the film was against aus­ter­i­ty. He was say­ing, ​‘No, it has saved us. The gov­ern­ment saved us.’ I think that this was a big issue, because Por­tu­gal is pret­ty much divid­ed into these two groups: the peo­ple that believe the aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures were a very good thing and nowa­days we have a much bet­ter soci­ety; and peo­ple, like me, that think that Por­tu­gal nowa­days is a mess and peo­ple are much less pro­tect­ed, liv­ing in much more dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tions than before.

When you were film­ing the chaffinch men at the end of the third part, were they on side with you, politically?

Some­times, but I guess most of them don’t care. Some of them, like the guy who catch­es the birds, he votes Com­mu­nist. He’s an old school left-wing Por­tuguese guy. But most of the oth­ers, they don’t vote and they don’t care. There are peo­ple who are so dis­ap­point­ed with the polit­i­cal sys­tem that they don’t care.

Did you tell them that you’re mak­ing this movie about the hor­ri­ble things that have hap­pened because of austerity?

They knew about that. But these are the guys that were already com­plete­ly fucked before the cri­sis. They live with some­thing like 150 euros of social wel­fare. They try to sur­vive by catch­ing birds and sell­ing birds, things like that. They know about it, but they think, ​‘We were like this before, so now every­one is get­ting worse, and we’re always in the worst place.’ Most of them were born in slums, and now they’ve been relo­cat­ed but they’re still very poor.

The chap­ter about the chaffinch­es feels like a hap­py end­ing to the film. That even though you have this extreme pover­ty ruin­ing people’s lives, they still man­age to build their own cul­ture and their own ways of liv­ing. It seems to be about survival.

I agree with you, but if there was anoth­er guy next to you say­ing the oppo­site of you, say­ing, ​‘In this last chap­ter, you can under­stand that the Por­tuguese are in deep shit, because these guys don’t do much for them­selves. How can they progress and try to achieve some­thing else because they’re alien­at­ed?’ I would agree in some way. But the sto­ry came to me more than I came to the sto­ry. I under­stood that by film­ing these guys, I was film­ing how much trou­ble they are in. They don’t seem to be able to change their sit­u­a­tion, so they invent this world with birds and bird­song. They’re invent­ing these rit­u­als and their own mythol­o­gy. It’s like a secret world that exists, a secret door that I entered.

Was it easy to enter that door?

Not so much. What they’re doing is ille­gal in Por­tu­gal, they’re not allowed cap­ture and keep these kind of birds in their homes. That’s one of the rea­sons why they don’t talk so much about it, and why they cov­er the cages of the birds. If the police come and see the birds, they’ll have to free them and pay a fine. What hap­pens is that they are so aggres­sive that they have this com­pe­ti­tion with them where they sing for their ter­ri­to­ry. If they hear anoth­er male singing, they’ll sing. It’s a kind of fight. And to get females, they sing anoth­er tune. They’re very aggres­sive, when you uncov­er them near anoth­er bird, they can go into the net of the cage and hurt themselves.

Do you open the news­pa­per in the morn­ing and think, ​‘Wow, that sto­ry could have been in Ara­bi­an Nights’? Is it liv­ing on with you?

Last week there was this awe­some sto­ry. I can’t remem­ber now, but in the moment when I read it, it was awe­some. When I came up with this film we invent­ed this very sci­en­tif­ic for­mu­la with three columns, in one of them we put what was com­ing in the news­pa­pers, in anoth­er we put what­ev­er we want­ed, fic­tion­al things we came up with – some­one had a dream yes­ter­day, let’s put the dream in that col­umn. The cen­tre col­umn we left emp­ty, and there we could cross what­ev­er we picked from the news­pa­per and what­ev­er my edi­tor dreamt two weeks ago and there was this merg­ing. But of course this is a pre­text. There was a moment where me and the oth­er guys who wrote the script were invit­ed to Brazil to give a writ­ing work­shop. We were work­ing on Ara­bi­an Nights so we said we would teach them the three col­umn sys­tem, and they took it very seri­ous­ly. But every day, grad­u­al­ly, they were more and more sus­pi­cious. By the end they told me it was bullshit.

Ara­bi­an Nights Vol­ume One is released 22 April, with Vols 2 & 3 out 29 April and 6 May.