Natalia Brizuela, co-curator of this series, is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley.

“One of the most original and inventive-as well as trenchantly political and painfully romantic-movies of recent years.”-Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Like the stylized F. W. Murnau film with which it shares a name, Tabu is split in two. Half is set in a distant “paradise” and relates a tale of taboo romance. The other half focuses on a triangle of women of various ages and backgrounds. The film shifts from modern-day Lisbon to a Portuguese colony in Africa in the 1960s, from life lived to life remembered. The two segments are told in different styles and tones that reverberate in mysterious ways.