Little White Lies March - April 2016

Directed by MIGUEL GOMES, Starring CRISTA ALFAIATE, CHICO CHAPAS, LUÍSA CRUZ Released 22 APRIL, 29 APRIL, 6 MAY   Hands up who remembers Woody Guthrie? Perhaps you’ve tapped a cuban heel along to his rousing folk standard, ‘This Land Is Your Land’? Or maybe you caught Hal Ashby’s 1976 film adaptation of his memoir, ‘Bound For Glory’, in which the nomadic troubadour penned songs inspired by the hardships he saw in Dustbowl America? He was a man who created rough-hewn, but humanist art. It transcended mere entertainment and became folkloric social history, a vital chronicle of a time, a place and a way of life. There has always been an inkling that Portuguese film director and occasional dandy, Miguel Gomes, styles himself as a modern-day Woody Guthrie, a cine-outlaw riding the rails and…

LISBON GOMES, You don’t know me, but I do know you. I’ve already been what you are, and am sending you this letter from your future. To be clear: I’m writing to myself twelve years ago. In my defence, this absurd idea is not my own, but comes from the magazine where this letter is being published. Please forgive my having had the nerve to go ahead with the challenge on behalf of us both. But please do not be upset about it. From my vantage point, you’re actually dead (in the Proustian sense, I believe you have read him), and I am not yet alive in your time. In reality, you’ll never be able to read these lines. You’re the prisoner of days long gone. You’re also the prisoner…

Miguel Gomes makes movies which stray from conventional norms. They’re free-and-easy reactions to the world and the moment rather than the precision-built machines that drop from the Hollywood production line. To help understand how he gets his movies made, we looked at the evolution of his writing techniques, from his 2004 debut feature The Face You Deserve through to a forthcoming, as-yet-untitled war movie. THE FACE YOU DESERVE (2004) Having made a name for himself with a series of exceptional shorts, Gomes produced this bizarre retelling of ‘Snow White’ set on the grounds of a large country house. “For this film, I tried to follow the book. Even if what was I wanted to film was not conventional. I was trying to make a film the way it’s supposed to…

Since the turn of the new millennium, the documentary has made a spectacular rise as an entertainment medium. As such, the very concept of what a documentary is, what it means, what it promises to a viewer, remains in constant flux. Even though it contains moments of overt fiction, some critics have described Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights as being a documentary – in that it embodies a number of key characteristics of the form. We put the question out there to a host of filmmakers, programmers and producers to find out… what actually is docuementary in 2016? MARC ISAACS Director – All White In Barking Documentary is a word that means less and less to me. It assumes some sort of privileged relationship with the real, as though a documentary…

Inspired by Miguel Gomes’ tactic of story collecting for Arabian Nights, LWLies set out in search of off-the-beaten-path true tales in the hope of glimpsing the soul of cinema today. In the coming pages you’ll find stories of obsession, accidents, gambles and mortality. We’ll take you behind the projector to meet filmmakers who reincarnate the same fiery car crash in every film they make, an eccentric fighting to use antiquated means to promote his parlour cinema, a journalist who accidentally nets more on a set visit than the eventual film’s entire box office takings, a projectionist who can effortlessly elevate a dud, a writer who by losing his integrity finds the key to new Hollywood economics and the secret source of a state-of-the-art star’s power. Now, let’s load the first…

Ultra-low budget, New-York based underground film studio Troma Entertainment is known for “42 years of failed film-making”. This is according to Lloyd Kaufman who co-founded the studio in 1974 with Michael Herz. Troma trademarks are unrealistic gore, gleeful bad-taste humour and generous nudity. There is also a sequence that has been lovingly recycled in features, shorts and even music videos to give fans a long-term running joke. The sequence is spectacular car crash footage in which a blue-green 1978 Ford Thunderbird hits a car parked in the middle of the road, does a slow-motion 360 degree flip, lands on the ground and then explodes. “It’s like the Alfred Hitchcock cameo now,” says Gabe Friedman, former Troma editor and a passionate cheerleader of what he calls ‘The Kabuki Flip’. The stunt…