A film buff and former film critic, Miguel Gomes is one of the most acclaimed Portuguese directors. His work brings together the formal radicalism of Manoel de Oliveira and the iconoclastic streak of João César Monteiro, forging an irreverent path that subverts the genres and narrative models of classical cinema. As attentive to reality as he is hungry for fiction, he sees cinema as the meeting point between preparation and the unexpected. As he himself has often said, all his films are adaptations of The Wizard of Oz.

The Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira presents the first exhibition dedicated to Miguel Gomes’ work, focusing on his working methods. Absurd rules devised by Gomes and production crises, whether real or staged, force him to respond to what happens. Working with close collaborators, Gomes interweaves writing, filming and editing in a process where the stories and images collected can transform the script or give rise to it: in Arabian Nights, stories researched by a team of journalists in Portugal during the years of austerity provide material for fiction; in Grand Tour, the documentary shoot in Asia precedes the writing of the script.

The exhibition brings together all of Miguel Gomes’ short films and excerpts from his features, alongside materials from the preparation and shooting of his films: scripts, notebooks, drawings, photographs, rehearsal recordings and rushes. Some works are divided across simultaneous projections or re-edited for the exhibition, revealing the relationships between reality and fiction, between the working process and the finished film. From his debut with Meanwhile in 1999 to his ongoing projects Savagery and Ballad, these materials allow us to follow the successive stages of production of his films and discover sequences omitted from the final versions.

The exhibition is organised by the Serralves Foundation — Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira, curated by António Preto, and coordinated by Carla Almeida.