Details by Film
Ossos
Streaming Options
In Vanda's Room
Streaming Options
Colossal Youth
Streaming Options
Ossos
The first film in Pedro Costa’s transformative trilogy about Fontainhas, an impoverished quarter of Lisbon, Ossos is a tale of young lives torn apart by desperation. After a suicidal teenage girl gives birth, she misguidedly entrusts her baby’s safety to the troubled, deadbeat father, whose violent actions take the viewer on a tour of the foreboding, crumbling shantytown in which they live. With its reserved, shadowy cinematography by Emmanuel Machuel (who collaborated with Bresson on L’argent), Ossos is a haunting look at a devastated community.
In Vanda's Room
For the extraordinarily beautiful second film in his Fontainhas trilogy, Pedro Costa jettisoned his earlier films’ larger crews to burrow even deeper into the Lisbon ghetto and the lives of its desperate inhabitants. With the intimate feel of a documentary and the texture of a Vermeer painting, In Vanda’s Room takes an unflinching, fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalized people, but is centered around the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte. Costa presents the daily routines of Vanda and her neighbors with disarming matter-of-factness, and through his camera, individuals whom many would deem disposable become vivid and vital. This was Costa’s first use of digital video, and the evocative images he created remain some of the medium’s most astonishing.
Colossal Youth
Many of the lost souls of Ossos and In Vanda’s Room return in the spectral landscape of Colossal Youth, which brings to Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas films a new theatrical, tragic grandeur. This time, Costa focuses on Ventura, an elderly immigrant from Cape Verde living in a low-cost housing complex in Lisbon, who has been abandoned by his wife and spends his days visiting his neighbors, whom he considers his “children.” 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.
Letters from Fontainhas: Supplements
This disc of supplements includes a new selected-scene audio commentary for Colossal Youth, featuring critic Cyril Neyrat and author-philosopher Jacques Rancière; All Blossoms Again (2006), Aurélien Gerbault's full-length documentary on director Pedro Costa and his relationship to the community of Fontainhas, shot partly during the making of Colossal Youth; Tarrafal and The Rabbit Hunters (both 2007), short films by Costa featuring Ventura from Colossal Youth; and Costa's video installation piece Little Boy Male, Little Girl Female (2005), made up of outtakes from In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth. All the films come with new and improved subtitle translations.
Release Information:
Technical Specifications
Supplements
- New video conversation between Pedro Costa and filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin
- New audio commentary featuring Pedro Costaconversation with filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin
- New video conversation between Pedro Costa and filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin
- New selected-scene audio commentary for Colossal Youth with critic Cyril Neyrat and author-philosopher Jacques Rancière
- Video interviews with critic João Bérnard da Costa and cinematographer Emmanuel Machuel
- Gallery of photos by Richard Dumas
- Theatrical trailer
- All Blossoms Again, a feature-length documentary on Costa, Colossal Youth, and the director’s relationship to Fontainhas
- New video essay by artist Jeff Wall
- Theatrical trailer
- Gallery of photos by Mariana Viegas
- Tarrafal and The Rabbit Hunters, two short films by Costa
- Little Boy Male, Little Girl Female, a video installation piece by Costa featuring outtakes from In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth
- A booklet featuring essays by critics Cyril Neyrat, Ricardo Matos Cabo, Lucy Sante, Thom Andersen, and Mark Peranson, as well as a reprint by Bernard Eisenschitz
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Release Notes on Restoration
Presented in its original stereo format, the soundtrack was remastered at 24-bit from the original 35mm magnetic soundtrack. Clicks, thumps, hiss, and hum were manually removed using Pro Tools HD. Crackle was attenuated using AudioCube's integrated audio workstation.
The film features a fully digital soundtrack. The audio for this release was mastered at 24-bit from the original digital audio master files using Pro Tools HD.
The film features a fully digital soundtrack. The audio for this release was mastered at 24-bit from the original digital audio master files using Pro Tools HD.