This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Grand Tour director Miguel Gomes.

An NYFF62 Main Slate selection, Grand Tour is now playing at Film at Lincoln Center. Get tickets!

In this fanciful and high-spirited cinematic expedition, the uncommonly ambitious Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes takes a journey across East Asia, skipping through time and countries with delirious abandon to tell the tale of an unsettled couple from colonial England and the world as it both expands and closes in around them. It’s 1918, and Edward has escaped the clutches of beckoning marriage, leaving his bemused fiancée, Molly, in hot pursuit. Edward gives chase from Mandalay to Bangkok to Shanghai and beyond, while Gomes responds with a splendid and enthralling series of scenes that use a magic form of cinema to situate us in these places both then and now, keeping us at a knowingly exotic traveler’s distance while also immersing us in rhythm, texture, and emotional reality. Whether black-and-white or color, zigzagging or meditative in tone, scripted or captured as documentary, Grand Tour is splendid, moving, and human-scaled. The film is the winner of the Best Director prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.