The US subprime mortgage crisis had its first warning signs with the foreclosure of low-income borrowers’ loans in 2006, which culminated in the insolvency of the investment bank Lehman Brothers two years later (Harvey 2010: 2). The American mortgage crisis rapidly contaminated the European financial market, and exposed the weakness of the financial system globally. The catastrophic dimensions of this event consisted of three simultaneous crises: the banking crisis (banks were extending too much credit, selling ‘toxic’ housing credit investments, and engendering speculative assets to produce fictional capital); the debt crisis (the increase of public borrowing); and the crisis of the ‘real’ economy (the stagnation of capital and the decrease of productivity) (Streeck 2014: 49). Austerity measures were then imposed as a strategy to reduce public spending and gain ‘confidence from the markets’ to avoid financial collapse (Streeck 2014: 49). Despite being felt globally, austerity had particularly drastic consequences in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain from 2010 onwards. Following Greece and Ireland, Portugal asked for a financial bailout in May 2011 (Hewitt 2011). Under the supervision of the IMF, EU and European Central Bank (known as the Troika), the coalition PSD/CDS-PP government imposed a series of austerity measures until 2015.

In a generalised collective hysteria, the themes of debt, crisis and austerity permeated public discourse; and not surprisingly, artists and film-makers produced a wide body of work centring on these topics. In Portugal, many of the films and art projects that emerged during and in the aftermath of the financial bailout have in common the backdrop of the economic crisis and/ or austerity.

As Mil e uma Noites (Arabian Nights, Miguel Gomes, 2015) is the most prominent project; a triptych that deploys simultaneously documentary and slapstick comedy to ironically dramatise ‘real’ stories collected from newspaper articles published between August 2013 and July 2014. The trilogy opens with The Restless One, specifically with a segment that conflates the layoffs at the shipyards of Viana do Castelo with the unusual story of a man who ingeniously invented a way to exterminate the Asian wasps’ nests that were plaguing bee farms in the region.