Born in 1972 in Lisbon (Portugal), where he lives and works.

After starting his career as a film critic, from 1999 Miguel Gomes directed a series of short films, followed by his first feature film in 2004, La Gueule que tu mérites. His fame grew internationally in 2012 with his film Taboo, which won the Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlin Film Festival. Two years later, his ambitious trilogy of The Arabian Nights borrowed the structure and form of the tale and transposed it with acerbic irony to Portugal between July 2013 and August 2014, when the country was ravaged by austerity policies. Drawing on popular imaginaries, his works are marked by the blurring of documentary and fiction that defines his style as a whole. He is currently working on an adaptation of the novel Os Sertões (The Highlands), written in 1902 by the Brazilian Euclides da Cunha.

Rédemption (2013) is a short film composed entirely using archival footage and set in dialogue with fictional stories written by Miguel Gomes and Mariana Ricardo. The latter take the form of intimate letters from people who melancholically retell stories of failure, regret or ghosts from their past. The work elicits an empathy that is out of step with the public actions of these individuals, who we come to realise are four prominent European politicians; Miguel Gomes ironically confers a quest for redemption upon each of these figures.