The day before he married his wife, the director Miguel Gomes (Lisbon, 1972) read him a passage from Somerset Maugham's travel book The gentleman in the parlour (1930), in which the author describes the encounter in Burma with an Englishman who is making a famous route through Southeast Asia (the so-called Grand Tour) to escape his promise and the prosperous marriage it represents. That this story about a groom on the run has ended up becoming the new film by the director of Taboo and Arabian Nights It says a lot about his sense of humour and his absolutely free and fabulating conception of cinema. "Fiction exists precisely to create parallel lives that are less boring than mine," says Gomes, who in the film Grand tour –Cannes Best Director Award– first follows the melancholic Edward's journey through Southeast Asia and then switches point of view to narrate how Molly searches for him in Rangoon, Bangkok, Saigon, the Philippines...