Over the next two weeks, we’re spotlighting two of the most distinctive international voices in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival: Miguel Gomes and Andrea Arnold. To celebrate the acclaimed Portuguese auteur’s first film in competition, Grand Tour, we’re happy to look back and screen the stylish summer short that kicked off Miguel Gomes’ career. Shot in sun-soaked 35mm, this musical comedy follows the ups-and-downs of a youthful ménage à trois.

Entretanto is the first in a series of early musical comedies that Gomes made, which set the stage for a career full of imaginative riffs on the playful visual grammar of musicals and silent films. His unique—and persistently contemporary—flair for touch-and-go filmmaking that explores familiar cinematic scenarios like parties and beach-side bronzing to unpredictable ends is on full display in this early short, where two adolescent boys’ amorous tug-of-war over an enigmatic girl never resolves itself and instead embodies the ineffable feeling of unfulfilled desire.

“Adolescence is like no man’s land. You have childhood, when you believe in things, then in adolescence there is a moment, for instance, you understand that grown ups are sometimes full of shit and they tell lots of lies” MIGUEL GOMES

Since making Entretanto at the turn-of-the-millennium, Gomes has continued exploring the intoxicating rhythms of summer, as in his sprawling Our Beloved Month of August (2008) and his recent The Tsugua Diaries (2021), which he co-directed with Maureen Fazendeiro. His ability to capture the allure of sweat-stained bodies and staccato conversations affected by heavy air conveys a youthful soul, forever in sync with the swelling of waves and rays of the sun.

Born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1972, Miguel Gomes studied filmmaking at the Lisbon Theatre and Film School. He worked as a film critic for the Portuguese daily newspaper Pùblico before he started making films. His second film, Our Beloved Month of August, won the Critics Award and Best Film at the Valdivia International Film Festival. And his follow-up, Tabu (2012), won the Alfred Bauer Award at the Berlinale. Since then, he has adapted the Middle Eastern epic One Thousand and One Nights to contemporary Portugal with his Arabian Nights (2015) trilogy and won a Best Director Award for his work on The Tsugua Diaries at Mar del Plata Film Festival. His newest film, Grand Tour (2024), is a period piece about a British civil servant on the run from his fiancée and will premiere in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer.