Tabu

Director: Miguel Gomes

2012 / 118min / DCP

Taking its title from F.W. Murnau’s 1931 collaboration with Robert Flaherty, Gomes’s dreamily enthralling and perversely pleasurable third feature, shot on black-and-white celluloid, injects the enchanted spirit of Old Hollywood melodrama into a structurally daring critique of colonialism that leaps from contemporary Lisbon to an unnamed Portuguese colony in the 1960s. “One of the most original and inventive—as well as trenchantly political and painfully romantic—movies of recent years.”—Richard Brody, The New Yorker