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COLOSSAL YOUTH
Juventude em marcha
Portugal, France, Switzerland | 2006 | 155 min
Old furniture thrown from a window at night, in a working-class neighbourhood; a woman who seems to come from the bottom of a cave holding a knife tells a story looking in camera. This is the opening sequence of Pedro Costa’s third film, set in Fontainhas, the Lisbon neighbourhood that has become the cinematic world of the Portuguese director. Juventude em marcha is a work about time ever since the mentioned sequence: about memory, about past and lost time, which can nonetheless resurface suddenly, like a ghost in the night, by way of a gesture or a story. This space, inhabited mostly by immigrants from Cabo Verde, is the setting for Ventura, another suspended body who no longer has a past and no future either – he can only experience the fleeting present of a rapidly vanishing neighbourhood in which man can only wander, as though everything were immersed in a ghostlike dimension. The film pursues Pedro Costa’s path of worlds/communities, in which urban space is increasingly becoming the place where the fight for memory is fought. (d.d.)