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.)
Local Time
- Timezone: America/New_York
- Date: 09 Nov 2023
- Time: 9:00
Location
- Cinema La Compagnia - Via Camillo Cavour, 50/R, 50121 Florence
Organizer
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Pedro Costa
Pedro Costa is one of the most important directors in contemporary Portuguese cinema. Born in 1959, he studied history and art history at the University of Lisbon before starting to work as an assistant director for some of the most prominent Portuguese directors, including João César Monteiro and André Téchiné. His career as a director began in 1989 with the film O Sangue, presented at the Cannes Film Festival in the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs section. Since then, he has directed numerous films that have been screened at major international festivals such as the Venice Film Festival and the Cannes Film Festival. His film In Vanda's Room (2000) won the FIPRESCI prize at the Cannes Film Festival and was selected to represent Portugal at the Oscars in the Best Foreign Language Film category. With his subsequent films Colossal Youth (2006), Horse Money (2014), and Vitalina Varela (2019), Costa continued to work with the same non-professional actors who live in a poor neighborhood of Fontainhas in Lisbon. His work has received numerous awards worldwide, including the Best Film award for Vitalina Varela and the Best Director award for Horse Money at the Locarno Film Festival. Costa is known for his unique aesthetic, which often relies on long static shots and a creative use of light and shadow, for his attention to detail and composition.
