A cross the course of history only a relative handful of filmmakers can be said to have developed and refined a language of cinematographic expression which inimitable belongs to its creator alone. Pedro Costa of our time exists within this select group and Colossal Youth is one of his sublime achievements. An intimate epic wherein present and past move as one Colossal Youth chronicles Ventura the towering Cape Verdean who has assumed the role of surrogate father to an untold number of characters around Lisbon and its now-razed neighbourhood of Fontanhas. Through Ventura's... ghost-like visitations to figures such as Vanda Duarte (the central personage of Costa's previous In Vanda's Room) and repeated recollections of his past life as a newly migrated manual labourer Costa explores the nature and necessity of storytelling in the course of the human adventure. As with In Vanda's Room Colossal Youth lays bare the residence of documentary inside of fiction (and vice-versa) using a digital video aesthetic in which every single image resonates with an indescribably poetic and rarefied force. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Colossal Youth in concert with Costa's complementary short works Tarrafal The Rabbit Hunters and Our Man - all for the first time in the UK. [show more]
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Portuguese film-maker Pedro Costa writes and directs this expressionistic docudrama chronicling the relocation of the inhabitants of a Lisbon slum to a new development on the outskirts of the city. Retired labourer Ventura, who emigrated from Cape Verde to Portugal in the early 1970s, has over the years become a father figure of sorts to an array of displaced and disenfranchised young people in and around the slum. The film takes the form of a sequence of vignettes chronicling the daily lives and conversations of the slum's inhabitants as they come to terms with the changes that lie ahead.
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