Retrospective: Pedro Costa

It’s an extraordinary honor to dedicate BIEFF’s inaugural auteur retrospective to Pedro Costa – a body of work that is unmatched in the landscape of contemporary cinema: spearheading an innovative approach to both formality and politics, breaking into new grounds in the digital age of the image, underpinned by collaborations with some of cinema’s greatest titans. Consisting of various features and shorts, spanning across decades, Costa’s oeuvre is an elegy for the marginalized, for those that have been wrung to the periphery of modern society, blown by the merciless winds of History in a ceaseless storm.(Flavia Dima) The retrospective was programmed by Pedro Emilio Segura Bernal and Flavia Dima.

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…