Miguel Gomes' 'Grand Tour' wins Grande Otelo Award

' Grand Tour' competed in the Best Ibero-American Film category with 'El Jockey' from Argentina, 'Estimados Señores' from Colombia, 'La Infiltrada' from Spain, and 'Sujo' from Mexico.

Miguel Gomes' film was chosen by the Portuguese Cinema Academy to represent Portugal in that category.

'Grand Tour' stars Gonçalo Waddington and Crista Alfaiate and, at its core, is the idea of a grand journey through Asia and two characters inspired by a travel book by the writer Somerset Maugham.

"What we had was a journey and we had these two characters: a man who was running away from his future wife; and a woman who refused to believe that her fiancé was running away from her and who stoically pursued him," recalled Miguel Gomes in an interview with the Lusa news agency last September, when the film premiered in theaters.

The trip to the East was undertaken by Miguel Gomes and a small team of screenwriters and technicians in the months before the COVID-19 pandemic, collecting images in various countries, which would later be used to write the script.

On his journey through Myanmar, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, and Japan, Miguel Gomes filmed contemporary life, karaoke nights, shadow puppet shows, anonymous people playing mahjong, bamboo forests, and cities with heavy traffic.

Later, the production built sets in studios in Rome and Lisbon, and filmed a black-and-white story, set in 1918, with Edward (actor Gonçalo Waddington), a civil servant of the British Empire who embarks on a solitary journey through Asia, after having run away from his fiancée Molly (actress Crista Alfaiate), on the day she arrives for the wedding.

Molly, persistent, follows the trail of her runaway fiancé through an Asian tour.

With 'Grand Tour', Miguel Gomes received the award for Best Director at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival in France.

The film, a co-production between Portugal, France and Italy, was Portugal's candidate for a nomination for the Oscars (USA) and Goya (Spain) film awards and has already been shown at more than 40 film festivals and exhibitions.

The Grande Otelo Brazilian Cinema Award is an initiative of the Brazilian Academy of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts, awarded annually in thirty different categories, recognizing cinema and audiovisual productions premiered and shown in the country.

The big winner on Wednesday night was 'I'm Still Here', by Walter Salles, which won awards in the categories of Best Fiction Feature Film, Best Director, Best Actress in a Feature Film (Fernanda Torres), Best Actor in a Feature Film (Selton Mello), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Visual Effects, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup, Best Editing, Best Sound and Best Soundtrack.

noticias ao minuto