FILMS/
COLOSSAL YOUTH
Juventude em marcha
World Cinema
Portugal/France/Switzerland, 2006, 155 minutes
SHOWTIMES
Sat, Apr 28 / 01:15 / Kabuki / COLO28K
Tue, May 1 / 03:15 / Kabuki / COLO01K
Sat, May 5 / 08:15 / PFA / COLO05P
CREDITS
- dir
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Pedro Costa
- prod
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Francisco Villa-Lobos
- scr
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Pedro Costa
- cam
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Pedro Costa, Leonardo Simões
- editor
-
Pedro Marques
- mus
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Nuno Carvalho
- cast
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Ventura , Vanda Duarte, Beatriz Duarte, Gustavo Sumpta, Cila Cardoso, Isabel Cardoso, Alberto "Lento" Barros, António "Nhurro" Semedo
- source
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Memento Films International, 6 cité Paradis, 75010 Paris, France FAX: +33-1-42-47-11-24 EMAIL: festival@memento-films.com
Colossal Youth is the third installment in Pedro Costa’s ongoing filmic collaboration with inhabitants of the Fontainhas district of Lisbon, a slum populated mostly by immigrants from Cape Verde. Costa reunites with Ventura, a 75-year-old Cape Verdean immigrant whom the director met during the filming of Bones (1997), and Vanda Duarte, also featured in Bones and whose struggle with heroin addiction was the focus of Costa’s follow-up In Vanda’s Room (2000). Since the making of these two films, the Fontainhas slum has been razed; the stepping-off point of Colossal Youth is the relocation of its inhabitants to a newly constructed district on the outskirts of the city. The film focuses on Ventura, who wanders back and forth between the nearly empty slum dwellings and the newly built apartment buildings, visiting Vanda (now clean) and other young immigrants who treat him as their "papa." Ventura’s visits with each of his "children" are like discreet duets, often in which the father sits silently while the child expresses his or her own suffering and disillusionment. Despite his tall frame, majestic composure and calm manner, Ventura is a lost soul himself; his wife recently has left him, and he lives a life without purpose. Costa presents the material and emotional wasteland of his sympathetic subjects within a rigidly stylized construct of extremely long takes anchored by frames of empty hallways and closed doors. Apart from Vanda’s improvised monologues, the actors speak their lines without intonation or expression. Costa’s austere cinematic style—a unique hybrid of documentary observation and fictional reenactment—certainly challenges viewers, but anyone seriously interested in the formal possibilities and rigorous inquiry of experimental film should not miss this rare opportunity to experience the understated power of the medium’s politicized successor to Robert Bresson and Jean-Marie Straub.
—Beverly Berning
Sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Presented in association with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.