Tabu

The film is split in two. The first part is set in present day Lisbon: an old woman, gambling debts, and the neighbour who looks after her. The second is set in Portuguese colonial Africa in the 1960s, in that woman's youth, and tells the story of a forbidden affair. Miguel Gomes shoots the second half without speech. No dialogue is heard, only a narrator's voice, music and ambient sound. That turns the film into a memory, because what is remembered has no soundtrack of its own. The image is 16mm, grainy and washed out. The title refers to F. W. Murnau's film of the same name, and Gomes takes his section titles from it while reversing their order. It won the Alfred Bauer prize and the FIPRESCI award at the Berlin film festival in 2012. Its difficulty is that the link between the halves does not arrive immediately, the pace is slow, and whether its view of the colonial period is critical enough has been argued over. Who it is for: viewers who like formal daring and references to film history. Who it is not for: anyone wanting straight narrative.