Tabu

★★★★★ The Independent

★★★★★ The Telegraph

'...it's a gem: gentle, eccentric, possessed of a distinctive sort of innocence – and also charming and funny.'  The Guardian

An unforgettable highlight of this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Miguel Gomes's extraordinary, lyrical film centres on the efforts of two elderly women—uptight widow Pilar (Teresa Madruga) and monosyllabic maid Santa (Isabel Muñoz Cardoso)—to track down the mysterious Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo), a man with whom their recently deceased acquaintance Aurora (Laura Soveral) had a passionate affair in her youth.

Set against the backdrop of wild sub-Saharan Africa, the film is shot entirely in black and white, brimming with deliciously strange visuals, and bookended by two unforgettable flashback sequences narrated entirely through voiceover. Tabu seems to have emerged from nowhere with a cinematic language entirely of its own, as indebted to the films of Terrence Malick as it is to early silent cinema.

Tabu, dir. Miguel Gomes, Portugal/Germany/Brazil/France 2012, 118 mins, Portuguese with English subtitles.