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 […]
Tag: 64 Festival dei Popoli
CHANGE NOTHING
Ne change rien France, Portugal | 2009 | 103 min Immersed in the darkness of particular spaces – a stage, a rehearsal studio – Jeanne Balibar is rehearsing the songs for her new album, exhibiting herself, taking lessons in opera singing, performing in a show. In every shot, her face emerges partially from the black […]
HORSE MONEY
CAVALHO DINHEIRO Portugal | 2014 | 104 min The return of Ventura, the man who in Juventude em marcha would wander among the remains of the Fontainhas neighbourhood. As often happens with Pedro Costa’s characters, Ventura returns because the cinema of the Portuguese film director is increasingly about time intended as a wound, as a […]
VITALINA VARELA
Portugal | 2019 | 124 min Already seen in Cavalo dinheiro, Vitalina Varela takes Pedro Costa back to the dark alleys and houses of Fontainhas, a neighbourhood in the Lisbon outskirts. The woman comes to Lisbon short after her husband Joaquim’s death for a long-awaited journey, but what she finds on her arrival is emptiness, […]
THE DAUGHTERS OF FIRE
11:00 AM MASTERCLASS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, TO FOLLOW As Filhas do Fogo Portugal | 2023 | 9 min In an abstract space, three women, isolated from each other, sing their sorrows. It is a heart-rending melody of grief and loneliness. Their faces question the gaze of the beholder. They left their homes and now […]
DOWN TO EARTH
Casa de Lava Portugal, France | 1994 | 110 min Pedro Costa’s second feature is at once a swerve from and a follow-up to the previous O sangue, not to mention that it is the necessary stepping stone towards Ossos. The journey of Mariana, a nurse who escorts her comatose patient up to Cabo Verde […]
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. […]
THE TINIEST PLACE
El lugar más pequeño Mexico | 2011 | 108 min The civil war in El Salvador, which started in 1979 and lasted for 12 years, ended with over eighty thousand casualties and thousands of desaparecidos. Countless villages were razed and ceased existing even in official maps. After two decades, the community of Cinquera has repopulated […]
TEMPESTAD
Mexico | 2016 | 105 min In a gloomy Mexico in arms, a woman’s voice describes the traumatic experience of having been unjustly arrested and then imprisoned in some jail controlled by a drug cartel. It was an actual descent into Hell: the heroine, whose face will never be revealed, is one of the uncountable […]
PRAYERS FOR THE STOLEN
Noche de fuego Messico Mexico, Germany, Brazil, Qatar | 2021 | 110 min Three girls, Ana, Paula, and María, are growing up in a rural community in the Mexican state of Jalisco. Their lives are threatened by drug cartels and human trafficking, with their mothers trying to protect them from kidnappings, while the girls have […]
