Dir. Pedro Costa, Portuguese, 2006, Portugal, Dir. Pedro Costa
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Wed 14 March 2012 // 19:30
/ Cinema
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"I now believe that Pedro Costa's career arc is one of the most fascinating in modern cinema" - PETER BRADSHAW, THE GUARDIAN
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Hailed as the Beckett of cinema, Costa has produced a staggering trilogy observing the demolition of the Fontainhas housing complex in Lisbon.
Colossal Youth focuses on Ventura, an elderly immigrant from Cape Verde Islands, who has assumed the role of surrogate father to the dispossessed. An intimate epic, where present and past move as one, collaboratively filmed with patience and empathy.
Excellent reviews of the film
"Running at over two and a half hours with virtually no plot to speak of, Colossal Youth, by the Portuguese director Pedro Costa, is extraordinary and otherworldly, but also an utterly unforgiving piece of film-making." - THE GUARDIAN
"However difficult and punishing his films are, I am becoming weirdly hooked on them. They deserve a hearing from people who are open-minded about cinema as an art form, and particularly as an experimental art form." - THE GUARDIAN
"The Portuguese film “Colossal Youth” was one of the most fascinating competition entries at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.
(...) Beautifully photographed, this elliptical, sometime
confounding, often mysterious and wholly beguiling mixture of fiction
and nonfiction looks and sounds as if it were made on another planet." - NEW YORK TIMES
Pedro Costa is a Portuguese filmmaker, who was mostly unknown until Collossal Youth (2006) was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, where it got great critical acclaim. His films subsequently toured in the US and in Europe, and he is now seen as one of the greatest experimental filmmakers at the moment.
The TAME MODERN showed a retrospective of his work in 2009: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/film/pedrocosta.htm
"Portuguese director Pedro Costa’s star has been on the ascent for some time now, generally kept as a secret until 2006’s Colossal Youth’s screening at Cannes aggravated a certain kind of audience enough for us to know a new master had suddenly jumped into the limelight." - MUBI
"Costa’s films transcend others on similar subjects because of his rigor, his knowledge of classical cinema (it seems to be in his blood), the amazing beauty of the images and the precision of the cutting, the unprecedented intimacy of his portraits, his extreme patience (twelve months of shooting for In Vanda’s Room, fifteen months for Colossal Youth), and his willingness to take risks that can leave viewers baffled or fascinated or both."
"For those who get past the initial difficulties, his films can inspire an obsessive devotion." – Thom Andersen, California Institute of the Arts
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Part of AV Festival 12: As Slow As Possible, www.avfestival.co.uk
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