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Letters From Fontainhas: Three Films By Pedro
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(DVD - Code 1) (US-Import)
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Inhalt: |
One of the most important artists on the internationaI fiIm scene today, Portuguese director Pedro Costa has been steadily buiIding an impressive body of work since the Iate eighties. And these are the three films that put him on the map: spare, painterIy portraits of battered, IargeIy immigrant Iives in the slums of Fontainhas, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Lisbon. Hypnotic, controlIed works, Ossos, In Vanda's Room, and CoIossal Youth
confirm Costa as a provocative new cinematic poet, one who Iocates beauty in the most unlikeIy of pIaces.
Ossos
The first film in Pedro Costa's transformative trilogy about
Fontainhas, an impoverished quarter of Lisbon, Ossos is a tale of young Iives torn apart by desperation. After a suicidal teenage girl gives birth, she misguidedIy entrusts her baby's safety to the
troubled, deadbeat father, whose vioIent actions take the viewer
on a tour of the foreboding, crumbIing shantytown in which they
Iive. With its reserved, shadowy cinematography by EmmanueI
Machuel (who colIaborated with Bresson on L'argent), Ossos is a haunting Iook at a devastated community.
ln Vanda's Room
For the extraordinarily beautiful second fiIm in his Fontainhas triIogy, Pedro Costa jettisoned his earlier fiIms' larger crews to burrow even deeper into the Lisbon ghetto and the Iives of its desperate inhabitants. With the intimate feeI of a documentary and the texture of a Vermeer painting, In Vanda's Room takes an unfIinching, fragmentary Iook at a handfuI of seIf-destructive, marginalized people, but is centered around the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte. Costa presents the daiIy routines of Vanda and her neighbors with disarming matter-of-factness, and through his camera, individuaIs whom many wouId deem disposabIe 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 Iost souIs of Ossos and ln Vanda's Room return in the spectral landscape of Colossal Youth, which brings to Pedro Costa's Fontain has films a new theatrical, tragic grandeur. This time, Costa focuses on Ventura, an elderIy 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 "chiIdren." What results is a form of ghost story, a taIe of dereIict, dispossessed people Iiving in the past and present at the same time, filmed by Costa with empathy and startling radiance. |
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