Colossal Youth | |
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Directed by | Pedro Costa |
Written by | Pedro Costa |
Produced by | Francisco Villa-Lobos |
Starring |
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Cinematography |
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Edited by | Pedro Marques |
Music by | Nuno Carvalho |
Distributed by | Memento Films |
Release dates |
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Running time | 156 minutes |
Country | Portugal |
Languages | Cape Verdean Creole Portuguese |
Colossal Youth (Portuguese : Juventude em Marcha, literally "Youth on the March") is a 2006 docufiction feature film directed by Portuguese director Pedro Costa. It was third feature by Costa set in Lisbon's Fontainhas neighborhood (after Ossos and In Vanda's Room ), and the first to feature the recurring character Ventura.
Colossal Youth was shot on DV in long, static takes; it also mixes documentary and fiction storytelling. The film is a meditation on the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution and its consequences for Portugal's poverty-stricken Cape Verdean immigrants. It was part of the Official Competition at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. [1]
"Many of the lost souls of Ossos and In Vanda’s Room return in the spectral landscape of Colossal Youth,.... What results is a form of ghost story, a tale of derelict, dispossessed people living in the past and present at the same time..." [2]
The film opens with a shot of a doorway in a run-down neighborhood. Furniture comes crashing down on the pavement from a second-floor window, followed by a close shot of a woman holding a knife and ranting. As in other parts of the movie, relationships of time and space between shots are not clear. It is not certain that the woman was the one throwing out the furniture or that the man she is complaining about is Ventura, the 75-year-old main character. (Like most of the film's other characters, Ventura is played by a nonprofessional.) Much of the film is taken up with Ventura's visits to other people in the area, many of whom he refers to as his "children." Sometimes in return, they refer to him as "Papa." At other times, Ventura is shown in his new, bright but almost barren, government-provided apartment, which contrasts sharply with the squalid and dark tenements that are due to be destroyed. Those rooms are often filmed in a high-contrast style that makes them strangely beautiful.
Ventura is asked to write a love letter by a fellow Cape Verdean (Lento) for his wife. Ventura's recitation of the letter becomes a recurring theme in the film. At times in the film, there are also allusions to past lives in the Cape Verde Islands and to Portugal's political past, the title "Youth on the March" being especially ironic.
Source: [2]
Source: [2]
When the film premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, many in the audience walked out, apparently frustrated by the film's long, static shots, long stretches of silence, and lack of narrative clarity. Roger Ebert reported that he did not go to see the film because the Time magazine critic Richard Corliss had warned him that his wife had gone and "walked out after an hour because the movie made her feel like rats were fighting in her skull.” [3] Other critics, however, have given the film serious consideration, comparing it to films by other directors notable for their slow and spare styes, including Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and the team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (one of Costa's mentors).
In a New York Times review, Manohla Dargis called Colossal Youth one of the most "misunderstood" films at Cannes, remarking, "Beautifully photographed, this elliptical, sometime confounding, often mysterious and wholly beguiling mixture of fiction and nonfiction looks and sounds as if it were made on another planet. And, in some respects, it was." [4] In 2007, Slant magazine critic Fernando F. Croce wrote that it is "as a compassionate and unmistakably spiritual document . . . that Colossal Youth leaves its deepest marks . . . and an intimidating aesthetic experiment becomes directly, colossally affecting." [5] And in a 2008 review, critic David Balfour describes the film as "a truly remarkable work from a man of unique vision," adding "It will divide those see it, even those who stay with it. The sense of dislocated in time and place is unique. The effect of the film is cumulative." [6]
This film, together with Ossos (1997) and In Vanda's Room (2000), is released by the Criterion Collection in a box set Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa. [7]
Bright Future is a 2003 Japanese drama film written, directed, and edited by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, starring Tadanobu Asano, Joe Odagiri and Tatsuya Fuji. It was entered into the 2003 Cannes Film Festival.
Pedro Costa is a Portuguese film director. He is best known for his sequence of films set in Lisbon, which focuses on the lives of the impoverished residents of a slum in the Fontainhas neighbourhood.
The Cinema of Portugal started with the birth of the medium in the late 19th century. Cinema was introduced in Portugal in 1896 with the screening of foreign films and the first Portuguese film was Saída do Pessoal Operário da Fábrica Confiança, made in the same year. The first movie theater opened in 1904 and the first scripted Portuguese film was O Rapto de Uma Actriz (1907). The first all-talking sound film, A Severa, was made in 1931. Starting in 1933, with A Canção de Lisboa, the Golden Age would last the next two decades, with films such as O Pátio das Cantigas (1942) and A Menina da Rádio (1944). Aniki-Bóbó (1942), Manoel de Oliveira's first feature film, marked a milestone, with a realist style predating Italian neorealism by a few years. In the 1950s the industry stagnated. The early 1960s saw the birth of the Cinema Novo movement, showing realism in film, in the vein of Italian neorealism and the French New Wave, with films like Dom Roberto (1962) and Os Verdes Anos (1963). The movement became particularly relevant after the Carnation Revolution of 1974. In 1989, João César Monteiro's Recordações da Casa Amarela won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and in 2009, João Salaviza's Arena won the Short Film Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Several other Portuguese films have been in competition for major film awards like the Palme d'Or and the Golden Bear. João Sete Sete (2006) was the first Portuguese animated feature film. Portuguese cinema is significantly supported by the State, with the government's Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual giving films financial support.
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Ossos is a 1997 Portuguese film directed by Pedro Costa.
In Vanda's Room is a docufiction film by Portuguese director Pedro Costa. This is the second film in his Fontainhas trilogy.
Down to Earth is a 1995 Portuguese drama film directed by Pedro Costa. The film is set in Cape Verde Islands, a former Portuguese colony.
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Docufiction is the cinematographic combination of documentary and fiction, this term often meaning narrative film. It is a film genre which attempts to capture reality such as it is and which simultaneously introduces unreal elements or fictional situations in narrative in order to strengthen the representation of reality using some kind of artistic expression.
Ethnofiction refers to a subfield of ethnography which produces works that introduce art, in the form of storytelling, "thick descriptions and conversational narratives", and even first-person autobiographical accounts, into peer-reviewed academic works.
Tabanka is a musical genre of Cape Verdean music.
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Events in the year 1997 in Portugal.
The following lists events that happened during 2000 in Portugal.
Horse Money is a 2014 Portuguese film directed by Pedro Costa. It premiered in August 2014 at the Locarno International Film Festival, where it won the award for Best Direction. Horse Money is the fourth film in a sequence of films set in the Fontainhas slum region in Lisbon, and the second with character Venturas as the protagonist.
Service is a 2008 Filipino independent drama film directed by Brillante Mendoza and stars Gina Pareño as the matriarch of the Pineda family who owns a porn cinema in Angeles City. The film competed for the Palme d'Or in the main competition at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. It is also the first Filipino film to compete at the main competition in Cannes, since Lino Brocka's Bayan Ko: Kapit sa Patalim in 1984.
Vitalina Varela is a 2019 Portuguese drama directed by acclaimed director Pedro Costa. It won the Golden Leopard and Best Actress Award at the 2019 Locarno Film Festival. The film follows Vitalina Varela, a character who previously appeared in Pedro Costa's Horse Money.