Arabian Nights: Volume 1 – The Restless One

The first part of a trilogy in which Miguel Gomes reflects on the miserable situation in Portugal, which suffers heavily under the economic crisis and the demands of the troika - represented here as merchants on camels. The playful form is borrowed from the fairy tale of Scheherazade, but the copiously metaphoric content is based on recent events in Portugal.
In this first part, after a documentary opening about the closure of a shipyard, things momentarily threaten to go wrong when the director (Gomes himself) is struck by fear of failure. Scheherazade takes his place and continues the narration. Impotent Portuguese rulers and their foreign masters get permanent erections thanks to an African miracle healer, a crowing rooster is brought to trial, a broken heart leads to arson and a beached whale and the traditional New Year’s Day swim give occasion for tragic personal stories. Gomes’s unabashed shifting between reality and fantasy drew a lot of attention at the Cannes Film Festival.