COLOSSAL YOUTH

Pedro Costa
Portugal, 2006
156 min.

Ventura, a Cape Verdean laborer living in the outskirts of Lisbon, is suddenly abandoned by his wife Clotilde. Ventura feels lost between the dilapidated old quarter where he spent the last 34 years and his new lodgings in a recently-built low-cost housing complex. All the young poor souls he meets seem to become his own children.

This last letter in the Fontainhas cycle – in fact, the first portrait of a trilogy centred around the magnetic Ventura, bearer of the violent social contradictions of post-revolutionary Portugal – is, like its predecessors, a turning point of formal reinvention in Pedro Costa’s career. Here, the usual notions of space and time are wrought between what is tangible and what is but memory, in what its author calls “an essay, a research on loss” prompted by the demolition of the Lisbon favela. Thus, Ventura becomes an avatar of the mythological Charon, ferrying us through the ruins of the neighbourhood, through its former inhabitants (amongst them, some familiar faces from Ossos and No Quarto da Vanda), through his own memories and, in an incredible and subversive auctorial gesture, through art history itself. Just look at this scene of extraordinary political symbolism where Ventura visits the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, simultaneously an iconoclastic indictment and act of reclaiming a denied space, both in the physical and allegorical sense. (Flavia Dima)

Data proiecție și locație

Sunday, 1st of October | 20:00

Cinema Elvire Popesco, Bd. Dacia, nr. 77
Cumpără bilet

Retrospective: Pedro Costa

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HORSE MONEY

Pedro Costa | Duration 103 min.

Ventura, Pedro Costa’s regular non-actor and elderly Cape Verdean immigrant, has lived in Lisbon since his youth, but it appears his stored anxieties of the 1974 Carnation Revolution are only now emerging from the shadows. Facing an officially glorious and liberating event, Ventura, the very subject the Revolution pretended to emancipate, recalls a life lived at the margins.

VITALINA VARELA

Pedro Costa | Duration 124 min.

The silhouette of a woman appears on the doorstep of an airplane. She slowly starts to descend, leaving a trail of tears in her wake. On the runway, a group of migrant women await her, dressed in utility uniforms. “Go back, Vitalina – you will find nothing here,” they say, embracing her; the woman silently walks on.

BONES

Pedro Costa | Duration 98 min.

After a suicidal teenage girl gives birth, she misguidedly entrusts her baby’s safety to the troubled, deadbeat father, whose violent actions take the viewer on a tour of the crumbling Fontainhas slums in which they live.

BLOOD

Pedro Costa | Duration 94 min.

Seventeen-year-old Vincente lives with his ten-year-old brother, Nino, and an abusive father in a derelict house on the outskirts of the city. When one day their father leaves for good, the two have to deal with the aftermath of his disappearance and try to mend a fractured family life, with the aid of Vicente’s girlfriend, Clara.

IN VANDA’S ROOM

Pedro Costa | Duration 171 min.

An unflinching and almost documentary-like view into the daily life of Vanda Duarte, a heroin addict in the Fontainhas outskirts of Lisbon. Pedro Costa’s first use of digital video.

COLOSSAL YOUTH

Pedro Costa | Duration 156 min.

Ventura, a Cape Verdean laborer living in the outskirts of Lisbon, is suddenly abandoned by his wife Clotilde. Ventura feels lost between the dilapidated old quarter where he spent the last 34 years and his new lodgings in a recently-built low-cost housing complex. All the young poor souls he meets seem to become his own children.

THE DAUGHTERS OF FIRE

Pedro Costa | Duration 9 min.

Three young sisters are set apart by the eruption of Fogo. But they sing. One day we’ll know why we live and why we suffer…

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