2024 - 69th Edition

Grand Tour

Miguel Gomes

Portugal, Italy, France

- 2024

National premiere

Edward, a civil servant in the British Empire, panics and flees the day his fiancée Molly arrives in Burma in 1918 to travel around several Asian countries before getting married (‘the so-called Grand Tour). Miguel Gomes, winner of the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival, takes as his starting point a fictionalised diary by Somerset Maugham, author of The Painted Veil and The Razor's Edge, to develop his own particular vision of adventure in this unusual piece, Portugal's Oscar nominee. Molly chases him and Edward flees, but the essence of the film lies in their journey together into the unknown, in their relationship hundreds of miles apart in the midst of exotic lands and unseen natural landscapes. In their particular way of understanding each place, an atypical melodrama about discovery, love and, ultimately, about the vertigo of discovery.

Miguel Gomes

Born in Lisbon (Portugal) in 1972, he trained at the Escola Superior de Teatro y Cine in his hometown and worked as a film critic before making the leap behind the camera.He directed several short films presented and awarded in international film festivals, before completing in 2004 his feature debut, ‘The Face You Deserve’, awarded at IndieLisboa. His next features ‘Our Beloved Month of August’ (Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight 2008), ‘Tabu’ (Berlinale Official Competition 2012: Alfred Bauer and FIPRESCI awards), ‘Arabian Nights’ (a film in three feature parts, Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, 2015) and ‘The Tsugua Diaries’, co-directed with Maureen Fazendeiro (Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, 2021), confirmed his international success and projection. In 2018 he was the president of the International Jury at Seminci. ‘Grand Tour’, his 6th feature, with world première in Cannes Film Festival’s 2024 Competition, won the Best Director Award there.

O.V. in Portuguese, Chinese, Thai, French, Burmese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Japanese subtitled in English and Spanish