![](https://www.festivaldeipopoli.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/2-8.png)
BONES
Ossos
Portugal, France, Denmark | 1997 | 94 min
Three characters, two girls and a boy, in a stylized melodrama set in Lisbon’s suburbs. An indifferent, aseptic space, composed of places of transit: an empty house, anonymous roads, markets, busses. Whatever happens to them, whatever upsets their lives seems not to transpire from their countenances. They move slowly, they betray no emotion, as if they weren’t human beings but rather not yet (or no longer) human figures. The bones in the title convey the idea, among other things, of subtracting, almost flaying the narrative as much as the expression. In the cinema of Pedro Costa, a double movement is increasingly taking shape: on one hand, the search for a narration that is essential, down to the single shot; on the other hand, a tendency towards expansion, meant to tell not only the stories of the characters, but also the world that envelopes them and determines their lives. (d.d.)