Looking for new ways to study Portuguese or interested in learning more about Portuguese films? Look no further. Few filmmakers in the world today are as original, celebrated, or quietly influential as Portugal’s Miguel Gomes. From his early short films to his Cannes Best Director win, Gomes has built a body of work that has put Portuguese cinema firmly on the global map.
Who Is Miguel Gomes?
First off: you might be wondering – who is Miguel Gomes? Born in Lisbon in 1972, Miguel Gomes is a Portuguese film director, screenwriter, and editor who studied cinema at the Lisbon Theatre and Film School. Before becoming a filmmaker, he worked as a film critic, which is a background that deeply informs his intellectually rich, layered approach to storytelling. His films combine documentary and fiction, weave together reality and fantasy, and draw on Portuguese culture, history, and politics in ways that feel both deeply personal and universally resonant.
Key Works
The Face You Deserve (2004)
Gomes’ first feature film, A Cara que Mereces (The Face You Deserve, 2004), marked the beginning of his rise in international cinema and announced the arrival of a bold new voice in European filmmaking.
Our Beloved Month of August (2008)
At the Cannes Film Festival in 2009, Gomes’s second feature Our Beloved Month of August premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section, a poetic film that includes documentary sequences on different Portuguese emigrants who return to their home regions for the summer. It also won about a dozen prizes at various international festivals and became one of the most successful domestic films of its time in Portugal.
Tabu (2012)
This is the film that truly put Gomes onto the international stage. Tabu tells the story of an old Portuguese woman who, shortly before her death, looks back on a romantic adventure she lived through during colonial times. The film was selected for the competition program at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Alfred Bauer Prize for Artistic Innovation and the FIPRESCI Jury Prize. It also won the Grand Prix for Best Film at the 39th Film Fest Gent. Critics and audiences around the world fell in love with its haunting beauty and its meditation on memory, loss, and Portugal’s colonial past.
Arabian Nights (2015)
Perhaps his most ambitious project, Arabian Nights is a three-part film trilogy that uses the structure of the classic folk tale as a lens through which to examine modern-day Portugal. In the individual parts—The Restless One, The Desolate One, and The Enchanted One—Gomes employs the Arabian folk tale structure and applies it to modern day Portugal. The Desolate One, the second volume, was Portugal’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Film category at the 2016 Oscars. The trilogy was met with widespread critical acclaim and cemented Gomes as one of Europe’s most daring and distinctive filmmakers.
Grand Tour (2024)
Grand Tour follows an early 20th century romance with Edward, a civil servant in the British Empire who runs away from his fiancée Molly on the day she arrives for the wedding. In preparation for the film, Gomes made a travel archive through Asia and visited Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand, and Japan to trace the characters’ paths. He collected contemporary images and sounds for the period feature film before shooting scenes with actors in a studio in Rome. The result is a visually breathtaking, genre-defying work that stunned critics at Cannes. Gomes won Best Director at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, the first Portuguese director to ever win that award.
The accolades have not stopped at Cannes. Grand Tour also earned Gomes the Silver Hugo for Best Director at the Chicago International Film Festival and was Portugal’s official submission for the 2025 Academy Awards. Then, in a landmark moment for Portuguese cinema, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences officially invited Gomes to join its ranks in 2025 as part of a class of 534 new members from around the world.
What Makes Miguel Gomes So Special?
What sets Gomes apart from his contemporaries is his refusal to be categorized. His films are not quite documentaries, not quite fiction, and not quite political essays yet they are also all of these things at once. He has a rare gift for finding the poetic in the everyday, and for using cinema to explore what it means to be Portuguese in a changing world. His work carries echoes of the great Portuguese directors who came before him, and in his Cannes acceptance speech, Gomes specifically thanked the legendary filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira, who inspired him to make films.
What’s Next for Miguel Gomes?
In February 2026, Gomes started shooting his next film, Savagery, co-written with Maureen Fazendeiro, Mariana Ricardo, and Telmo Churro. It is based on the Brazilian 1902 non-fiction book Os Sertões by Euclides da Cunha, and is set shortly after the abolition of slavery in Brazil and the overthrow of the Portuguese monarchy. It promises to be another bold, ambitious work from one of the world’s most exciting directors.
Final Thoughts
Miguel Gomes is a critically acclaimed filmmaker and an ambassador for Portuguese culture, history, and identity on the world stage. Every award he wins, every festival he conquers, shines a spotlight on Portugal and inspires a new generation of Portuguese filmmakers to tell their own stories with courage and originality. In a country with a rich but often overlooked cultural heritage, Gomes is proof that Portuguese cinema can compete with and surpass anything the world has to offer. We encourage you to check out his films and let us know what you think in the comments!
