Tabu

Portugal/Germany/Brazil/France 2012, 111 min, German subtitles

Of love and guilt: Miguel Gomes places his magical film in the fractured landscape of colonial history, between Portugal and its former “possessions”. “Lost Paradise”, the film’s first part, depicts the story of three women living in a Lisbon housing complex, circling around each other in diverse forms of dependency and around memories of colonial times. The second part portrays a forbidden love in an unnamed African country. Indulging in the style of expressionism, Gomes plays with a silent-film aesthetic and Southern exoticism, recalling Murnau’s famous film. Ultimately concluding in a birth and the outbreak of the war of liberation against Portugal