COLOSSAL YOUTH

One of the most important artists on the international film scene, Portuguese director Pedro Costa has steadily built an impressive body of work since the late eighties. The films that put him on the map are his spare, painterly portraits of battered, largely immigrant lives in the slums of Fontainhas, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Lisbon. In the spectral landscape of COLOSSAL YOUTH, we return to Fontainhas with a new theatrical, tragic grandeur.

Costa combined various Cape Verdean immigrants’ letters home and a note written by the surrealist poet Robert Desnos to his wife shortly before his death to create a letter which exists at the center of this rich, staggeringly complex film. Its author is Ventura, an aging Cape Verdean immigrant who spends his days visiting the residents of a neighborhood that no longer exists. His wife has left him; his “children,” as he calls them, have mostly been relocated to sterile housing projects; and it is in the letter he recites throughout the movie that his hopes have all been packed. What results is a form of ghost story, a tale of derelict, dispossessed people living in the past and present at the same time, filmed by Costa with empathy and startling radiance.