Video & On Demand - Arabian Nights DVD & Download

Arabian Nights DVD & Download

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The latest from Miguel Gomes (Tabu, Our Beloved Month of August) Arabian Nights (As mil e uma noites) is probably this year’s most ambitious cinematic undertaking, and the most talked about film experience of the last Cannes Film Festival. Arabian Nights uses the framing device from the original Arabian Nights of the beautiful young Scheherazade telling tale after tale in order to keep her murderous husband from killing her—but that’s where the similarities end. Over three features, Gomes channels the current struggles of economically depressed Portugal through an assortment of tales that range from farcical yarns to grounded accounts of social issues.

Volume 1 – The Restless One: After opening with overlapping documentary portraits of a shipyard and a wasp-exterminator, the director appears on screen, contemplating his overly ambitious undertaking. From here, Gomes spins a satirical tale about the financial powers-that-be preying on Portugal’s vulnerability. Next up is the comic story of the role a rooster plays in a local election, followed by a sobering triptych of interviews with unemployed citizens.

Volume 2 – The Desolate One: The volume's opening chapter is about a criminal on the run. In “The Tears of the Judge,” a public trial becomes a mockery, with the testimony implicating everyone in attendance. Finally, The Desolate One ends on an exhilarating note, with a hugely entertaining story about a dog named Dixie who’s passed between owners, familiarizing us with the inhabitants of a working-class apartment building.

Volume 3 – The Enchanted One: Having escaped the palace, Scheherazade explores a seaside landscape where she encounters, among others, a “wind genie” and a daft suitor. This segues into a documentary-style exploration of the working-class sport of chaffinch singing competitions. Movingly and unexpectedly, the last gesture of Arabian Nights is to scale back its scope and provide a disarmingly modest and poignant grace note on which one of contemporary cinema’s new masterpieces can close.' (Vancouver Film Festival Catalogue)

Tthe 3 disc DVD also includes Miguel Gomes' short film Redemption. Arabian Nights is a joint acquisition of New Wave Films and MUBI.

Quinzaines des réalisateurs, Cannes 2015
Palme Dog, Cannes 2015
Sydney Film Prize, Sydney Film Festival 2015
London Film Festival 2015

DVD available from:
3-Disc boxset DVD Amazon UK

Rent or Buy from:

Volume 1:
iTunes

Amazon Video

Volume 2:
iTunes

Amazon Video

Volume 3:
Tunes

Amazon Video

CREW

director	Miguel Gomes
screenwriters	Miguel Gomes,
	Mariana Ricardo,
	Telmo Churro
cinematographer	Sayombhu Mukdeeprom
	Lisa Persson (The Inebriating
	Chorus of the Chaffinches)
	Mário Castanheira (The Story
	of the Cockerel and the Fire)
editing	Telmo Churro,
	Pedro Filipe Marques,
	Miguel Gomes
sound	Vasco Pimentel
production design	Bruno Duarte, Artur Pinheiro
assistant director	Bruno Lourenço
journalists	Maria José Oliveira,
	Rita Ferreira,
	João de Almeida Dias
research	Vasco Costa
costumes	Silvia Grabowski,
	Lucha D’Orey
sound editing and mix	Miguel Martins
foleys	Denis Séchaud,
	Pascal Mazière
colorist	Christophe Bousquet
production manager	Isabel Silva
executive producer	Luís Urbano
co-producers and associate	Olivier Père, Remi Burah
producers	ARTE France Cinéma

	Meinolf Zurhorst,
	Alexander Bohr
	ARTE/ZDF

	Nuno Vaz
	RTP

	Françoise Mayor,
	Sophie Sallin, Sven Wälti,
	Gregory Catella
	RTS Radio Télévision Suisse
	– SRG SSR

	Robert Guédiguian
	Patrick Sobelman
	Marc Bordure
	AGAT FILMS & Cie

	Michel Merkt

producers	Luís Urbano, Sandro Aguilar
	O SOM E A FÚRIA

	Thomas Ordonneau
	SHELLAC SUD

	Jonas Dornbach,
	Janine Jackowski,
	Maren Ade
	KOMPLIZEN FILM

	Elena Tatti, Thierry Spicher,
	Elodie Brunner
	BOX PRODUCTIONS

MUSIC CREDITS

Title, performers, album	Composer

Volume 1

Tres diferencias de “Guárdame las vacas”	Luys de Narváez
Played by José Miguel Moreno

Perfidia	Alberto Dominguez
Sung by Phyllis Dillon

Bachianas Brasileiras No 4	Heitor Villa Lobos

Scheherazade	Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Chamego do Papai	Zé do Rojão, Zé Calixto
From the album Uma Sanfona de Respeito
Sung by Zé Calixto

Für Alina	Arvo Pärt

Chaos is my Life	Wattie Buchan
From the album Fuck the System
The Exploited

Perfidia	Alberto Dominguez
Played by El Trio Los Panchos

Volume 2

O Pau do Meu Vizinho	Páquito C. Braziel, Daniel Duarte
From the album A Barraca Abana
Sung by Joana

Lover Why	J.L. Milford, P. Ives, J. Weysley
From the album …And Soul it Goes
Century

Say You, Say Me	Lionel Richie

Side One of Vol 2 from the album
Noujoum Taarab el Mauritanie (Stars of Mauritanian Music)
Sung by Momma mint Dendenni
Guitar player Seddoum ould Bowba Jiddou

Perfidia	Alberto Dominguez
From the album A Mis Amigos
Sung by Nat King Cole

Classic	Adrian Gurvitz
Played by Adrian Gurvitz

Que Beleza	Tim Maia
Sung by Tim Maia
From the album Racional Vol. 1

Volume 3

Laya
Played by Nihar Mehta

Samba da Minha Terra	Dorival Caymmi
Played by Novos Baianos

Imagens	Guida Bastos
Played by Guida Bastos

Exodus	Alkayeta
Played by Alkateya

Perfidia	Alberto Dominguez
Played by The Glenn Miller Orchestra

Perfidia	Alberto Dominguez
Played by El Trio Los Panchos

Perfidia	Alberto Dominguez
From the album A Mis Amigos
Sung by Nat King Cole

Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft	Klaatu
Sung by The Langley Schools Music Project
From the album Innocence and Despair

Son of a Gun	Lee Hazlewood
Sung by Lee Hazlewood
From the album Trouble is a Lonesome Town

Perfidia	Alberto Dominguez
Sung by Crista Alfaiate

Fala	João Ricardo, Luhli
Played by Secos & Molhados


CAST

Volume 1
The Restless One

Scheherazade/Punk Maria	Crista Alfaiate
Luís / Luís	Adriano Luz
IMF representative	Américo Silva
Portuguese Prime Minister	Rogério Samora
Brazilian translator	Carloto Cotta
Cockerel owner	Fernanda Loureiro
Prostitute	Luísa Cruz
Catarina	Ana Margarida Rabaca
Sandra	Sabrina Lopes
Rui Miguel	Carlos Loureiro
Basirou Diallo	Wizard
Shipyard Workers	Miguel Cerqueira
	Alberto Joaquim Novo
	Martinho Cerqueira
	Vítor Vieira
1st Magnificent	Anibal Fabrica
2nd Magnificents	Sónia and Rui
3rd Magnificent	Paulo Carvalho

Volume 2
The Desolate One

Simão 'Without Bowels'	Chico Chapas
Judge	Luísa Cruz
Genie / Injured Cow	Crista Alfaiate
Judge's daughter / Vânia	Joana de Verona
Vasco / dumb son	Gonçalo Waddington
Luisa	Teresa Madruga
Humberto	João Pedro Bénard
Speaker for Chinese Ladies	Jing Jing Guo
Father of the Good Thief	Adriano Luz
Cattle Dealer	Américo Silva
Masked joker	Carloto Cotta
Dixie	Lucky

Volume 3
The Enchanted One

Scheherazade/Beatriz Hesler	Crista Alfaiate
Grand Vizier	Américo Silva
Chico Chapas	Chico Chapas
Chaffinch fancier	Gonçalo Waddington
Hot Forest voice	Jing Jing Guo
Paddleman	Carloto Cotta
Alves	Bernado Alves


INDEX OF EPISODES

Volume 1
the restless one
The Work of the Film Director,
of the Shipyard Workers and of
the Wasp Exterminator	minute 1
The Island of the Young Virgins of Baghdad	minute 24
The Men with a Hard-ons	minute 29
The Story of the Cockerel and the Fire	minute 50
The Swim of the Magnificents	minute 81
The First Magnificent’s Story	minute 87
The Second Magnificents’ Story	minute 101
The Third Magnificent’s Story	minute 109

Volume 2
the desolate one
Chronicle of the Escape
of Simão ‘Without Bowels’	minute 124
The Tears of the Judge	minute 161
The Owners of Dixie
Part One :
Glória, Luísa and Humberto	minute 202
The Stories of the Residents of the Tower Block
told by Humberto and Luísa
Part Two:	minute 222
Vasco, Vânia, Ana and her Grandchildren	minute 234

Volume 3
the enchanted one
Scheherazade (on the 515th day of
narrating stories to the King)	minute 256
The Inebriating Chorus of the Chaffinches	minute 297
Hot Forest	minute 339

★★★★ 'We close with a choral cover version of the Carpenters’ Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft: a real cry for help. Why aren’t there many more colossal movie trilogies about austerity? Should they look like this? If austerity-battered people are allowed bread, then they are allowed roses, in the form of a fantasy life, a resistance through imagination. What a delicate, elegant marvel these movies have been.'

Peter Bradshaw, THE GUARDIAN

★★★★★ 'One could only be lookng forward to the third and final volume of Portuguese director Miguel Gomes's Arabian Nights trilogy. The Enchanted One ends the magic voyage between the veiled curtains of Arab courts and crowds protesting in Portugal...like King Sharyar, we just long to hear more.

Jasmin Valjas, theupcoming.com

★★★★'Rules don't mean much to Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes and he concludes his masterly triptych by confounding expectations that loose ends will be conveniently tied and that viewers will be sent away after 382 minutes with a trenchant and insightful message ringing in their ears.'

Radio Times

'Audacious, ambitious, imaginative, unique and radical, Miguel Gomes's 'Arabian Nights' takes the classic Arabian Nights and adapts the beautiful young Scheherazade's tale...with real life stories that refelct Portugal's politcs and the hardships suffered by ordinary people during the years of economic chaos. Original and powerful...a unique, prsonal cinematic response to political reality.'

Clive Botting, The Huffington Post

★★★★
'An exotic and mysterious miscellany in one of three feature-length movie episodes from Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes: a docu-fantasy hybrid, epically and experimentally proportioned and loosely inspired by the Arabian Nights. 'Gomes's Arabian Nights exerts a strange allure.'
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

★★★★
'Do not come to Miguel Gomes's Arabian Nights expecting genies. Don't expect social realism either. Yes, real life is strung across the first of the films... After all three films you'll be exhausted, but gladdened. In times of brutal efficiencies sheer mad maximalism is its own best protest.'
Danny Leigh, The Financial Times

★★★★

'...the single greatest new work unleashed at Cannes in 2015... Arabian Nights retains a core, inimitable stylistic unity, which instils even the most guarded spectator with an irrepressible desire not just to watch cinema, but to live it.'
Senses of Cinema

★★★★

- See more at: http://www.newwavefilms.co.uk/critics/136#sthash.E1r9C1pL.dpuf

'One thousand and one nights in European austerity. This is not Ken Loach-style gritty realism, but surreal satire.'
THE TIMES

★★★★

'By turns surreal, giddy, erotic, didactic, righteous, exhausting, boundlessly creative and a thousand and one other things, this shape-shifting colossus feels as diverse as the people of Portugal themselves.'

David Erlich Time Out New York

★★★★

'Arabian Nights veers from the naturalistic to the fantastical, from documentary to fiction...this is daring, magical film-making.'

Jamie Graham, Total Film

'A film unlike any other, part social realism, part magical realism.'

Kate Muir, The Times

'The really outré attraction of the festival, in the end, was in Directors’ Fortnight – the six-hour, three-partArabian Nights from Portuguese experimenter Miguel Gomes. This is not an adaptation of the old tales, but an attempt to engage with Portugal’s economic crisis, using Scheherazade as a structuring device. But this doesn’t begin to convey the inspired oddity of Gomes’s epic, a barely categorisable encyclopedia of a film. It takes in documentary, mock-documentary (with non-professionals playing themselves), Brechtian theatre, and cod-exotic sequences featuring camels, genies, princesses and even an exploding whale.

It was the most authentically crazy film on show here, the biggest splash of true innovation in Cannes, and an unmissable art event.

Jonathan Romney, The Observer

'Brilliant...every minute is sensational.'

Kaleem Aftab, The Independent

‘A film about protest rather than a protest film. It’s an improvised, on-the-lam masterpiece, a lopsided folk-art shrine, which finds genuine hope (rather than erroneous cinematic hope) within a context of incomparable despair.

Vive le Gomes…’

David Jenkins, Little White Lies

‘Truly remarkable. ‘A sprawling, angry, comical extemporization on the state of Portugal - a gallimaufry of personal testimony and imaginative mythologizing.

One of the must-sees of the year.'

Nick James, Sight and Sound

‘The film is hugely entertaining and quite magical in places.’

Jonathan Romney, Screen

‘The two masterworks that defined Cannes 2015 were Miguel Gomes’s wild and sprawling Arabian Nights and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour.

Arabian Nights is an up-to-the-minute rethinking of what it means to make a political film today. It is hard to imagine a more generous or radical approach to these trouble times – one that honors its fantasy life as much as its hard realities.’

Dennis Lim, Film Comment

‘For all the film’s politics, Arabian Nights can also be whimsical, swooningly romantic, inspiring, fascinating, or deeply sad.’

Oliver Lyttelton, The Playlist / Indiewire

‘Fascinating even in its misfires, this sprawling and fantastical document of the country’s plight in the wake of the global financial crisis confirms Gomes as one of the most exhilaratingly inventive filmmakers working today.’

Giovanni Marchini Camia, The Film Stage

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