Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One

To tell the story of Portugal's austerity years, Miguel Gomes worked for a year with a team of journalists who filed dispatches from across the country, and he turned those real events into fables. This first of three volumes takes from the book only Scheherazade's obligation to keep telling; none of the stories are from the Nights. The film opens with the director himself fleeing the set, a joke that also explains the method: documentary footage about unemployment sits inside the same narrative as an exploding whale and a talking cockerel. The most discussed episode is the one in which the troika running economic policy tries to solve its impotence problem with a sorcerer. It premiered at Cannes in the Directors' Fortnight on 16 May 2015. Each volume runs about two hours. Who it is for: viewers who value formally daring, sardonic, political European cinema. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a straight narrative or an adaptation of the Arabian Nights, neither of which is here.