Crista Alfaiate

In Portugal - one European country in crisis- a film director proposes to build fictional stories from the miserable reality he is immersed in. However, failing to find meaning in his work, he cowardly runs away and leaves the beautiful Scheherazade to stand in his shoes. She will require enthusiasm and courage so as not to bore the King with sad stories of this country. As nights go past, restlessness leads to desolation and in turn to enchantment. Therefore Scheherazade organizes the stories she tells the King in three volumes. She begins like this: "It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that in a sad country among all countries...".

It's here that the trilogy is both at its most playful and focused. Having escaped the palace of the king, Xerazade explores a seaside landscape where she encounters, among others, a "wind genie" and a daft suitor. In this chapter, it's as if the historical backdrop, the modern world and the disparate modes of storytelling collapse into one another. Movingly and unexpectedly, the last gesture of Arabian Nights is to scale back its scope and provide a disarmingly modest and poignant grace note on which one of contemporary cinema's new masterpieces can close.

The dramatic shifts in tone become even more pronounced with the second film's slow-tempo opening chapter about an old man on the lam. In 'The Tears of the Judge', a public trial becomes a mockery, with the testimony implicating everyone in attendance. The Desolate One ends on an exhilarating note, with a supremely entertaining story about a dog named Dixie who's passed between owners, familiarising us with the inhabitants of a working-class apartment building.

Winner of the Best Director prize at Cannes, Miguel Gomes’s transcendent travelogue sets sail for spellbinding horizons, where romance and adventure thrillingly entwine. Guided by the capricious will of the heart, this epic tale of love on the run is a movable feast for the mind and the senses.