Colossal Youth

Many of the lost souls of Ossos (1997) and In Vanda’s Room (2000) return to the spectral landscape of Colossal Youth, which brings a new theatrical, tragic grandeur to Pedro Costa’s Fontaínhas films. This time, Costa focuses on Ventura, an elderly immigrant from Cape Verde living in Lisbon. After being married for 34 years, his wife Clotilde has left him and he now looks back on a harsh and cheerless life. Ventura writes her a letter that is heartrending in its inept despair. Time and again, he recites the letter while he is about to be cut out of his district and moved into a bare apartment. As Cyril Neyrat writes for The Criterion Collection, “Ventura is the one to dictate the film's form, to invite Costa to leave behind the horizontality of the chronicle for the verticals and oblique lines of the great epic form. Ventura is a block of strangeness, an anachronistic presence who carries within him the entire history of his people and their neighbourhood”.

Duration: 156'
Production year: 2006
Country: PT
Language: PT

Cannes Film Festival 2006 – Official Selection in Competition

Pedro Costa

Widely acclaimed as Portugal's greatest living filmmaker, Pedro Costa was born in Lisbon in 1959. A History student at the University of Lisbon, he gave up his studies to attend the classes of poet and director António Reis at the Lisbon Theatre and Film School, where he ended up enrolling, and soon worked as an assistant director to Jorge Silva Melo, Vítor Gonçalves and João Botelho. His first feature film, O Sangue, had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 1989, and already displayed the distinctive tone of a work marked by both political and poetic attention to marginalised lives. His second film, Casa de Lava (1994), shot in Cape Verde, was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. This was followed by the famous Fontaínhas trilogy, consisting of Ossos (1997), In Vanda's Room (2000) and Colossal Youth (2006), in which he portrays the lives of the men and women – immigrant, racialised, impoverished – who inhabit this slum neighbourhood on the outskirts of Lisbon. Costa also directed Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (2002), with Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, and Change Nothing (2009), with actress Jeanne Balibar. In 2012, he was part of the collective feature film Centro Histórico, alongside Manoel de Oliveira, Aki Kaurismäki and Víctor Erice. In 2014, Horse Money won the Golden Leopard for Best Direction at the Locarno Film Festival and, in 2019, Vitalina Varela won the Golden Leopard for Best Film at the same festival.