The cinematography by Rui Poças is one of the film’s greatest achievements. Shot entirely on 16mm and 35mm film, the high-contrast black-and-white imagery gives the movie a timeless, ghostly quality. It evokes the silent era of cinema while maintaining a sharp, intellectual edge.
Delaney discovers his father has died under suspicious circumstances and left him a strategically valuable piece of land called Nootka Sound. He must outmaneuver the East India Company and the British government. pelicula tabu 1
Miguel Gomes’ 2012 film Tabu is a work of cinematic enchantment that operates on the borders between reality and fantasy, past and present, and silence and song. Divided into two distinct yet intertwined parts, the film is a meditation on the nature of memory, colonialism, and the inescapable weight of the past. By utilizing a unique formal structure—a prologue and two asymmetrical sections—Gomes deconstructs traditional narrative tropes, creating a film that feels less like a story being told and more like a fading dream being recalled. The cinematography by Rui Poças is one of
In the mid-1980s, Spanish cinema was undergoing a profound transformation. The post-Franco destape (loosening of censorship) had already opened the doors to more explicit content, but few filmmakers dared to use that freedom for something more than mere titillation. Eloy de la Iglesia was an exception. With Tabú 1 , he launched a series that would blend eroticism, social critique, and psychological tension — all while navigating the thin line between art cinema and adult film. Delaney discovers his father has died under suspicious
In conclusion, Miguel Gomes’ Tabu is a masterful exploration of how we construct our histories. By blending documentary realism with the archaic tropes of melodrama, Gomes creates a unique cinematic language that feels both old and startlingly new. The film argues that "paradise" is an illusion that can never be recovered, a tabu that can never be broken, leaving us with nothing but the beautiful, melancholic echo of what once was.