Miguel Gomes won today the Best Directing Award at the Cannes Film Festival (France) - an unprecedented feat in Portuguese cinema - for the film 'Grand Tour', produced by Filipa Reis, from the production company Uma Pedra no Sapato, in co-production with Italy, France, Germany, China and Japan.

"Knowing that we are not a country with great financial capacity, we have bet on the possibility of taking risks in projects that are by the author. In other words, the authors have the possibility of creating freely and that is the most precious thing in our cinema and I think that is what brought us here", the producer told Lusa, shortly after the festival's closing ceremony.

The story of 'Grand Tour' follows a romance from the beginning of the 20th century, with Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a civil servant of the British empire who runs away from his bride Molly (Crista Alfaiate) on the day she arrives for the wedding.

In the preparation of this film, even before the Covid-19 pandemic, Miguel Gomes made a travel archive through Asia - for example, Myanmar (former Burma), Vietnam, Thailand, Japan -, to trace the characters' journey, collecting contemporary images and sounds.

Only after this journey, Miguel Gomes shot in 2023 the scenes with the actors in a studio, in Rome, recreating a period atmosphere of 1918, the time of Edward and Molly's story.

The screenplay is co-written by the filmmaker with Mariana Ricardo, Telmo Churro and Maureen Fazendeiro.

Miguel Gomes received the award from the German filmmaker Wim Wenders and in a short speech thanked Portuguese cinema, stressing the rarity of having Portuguese films in the official competition, and extended his thanks to "great filmmakers" such as Manoel de Oliveira, who inspired him to make films.

18 years ago, in 2006, in the feature film competition was "Juventude em Marcha", by Pedro Costa.

'Grand Tour' still has no release date announced, either internationally or in Portugal, but Filipa Reis took advantage of Cannes to work on the production of Miguel Gomes' next film, the already revealed 'Selvajaria', to be shot in Brazil, based on the literary work 'Os Sertões', by the Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha.

"As the producer of Miguel's next film, [the award in Cannes] gives me an expectation - I hope it will be fulfilled - that the next film will be able to have faster and less time-consuming financing. Because one of the problems of Portuguese cinema is that, as the financing is low, it takes us many years to complete the films. My ambition is that Miguel's next film will reach the cinemas faster than this one did", she said.

At the 77th Cannes Film Festival, a special mention was also given to the film 'Bad for a moment -- Mau por um momento', by the Portuguese director Daniel Soares, which competed in the short films.

Leia Também: 'Grand Tour' gives Miguel Gomes the best directing award in Cannes (Portuguese version)