Colossal Youth Introduced by Pedro Costa

“Beautifully photographed, this elliptical, sometimes 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.”—Manohla Dargis, New York Times

Colossal Youth, the final film in Costa’s Fontainhas trilogy, straddles the line between ethnographic documentary and austere avant-garde filmmaking. Its story follows an unemployed man, Ventura, who is relocated from his dilapidated neighborhood to a low-cost housing complex after his longtime wife leaves him. Costa culled his film from over 300 hours of footage, and the result is a humanist epic comprising Ventura’s encounters with the lost souls in his new neighborhood. Colossal Youth was one of the most talked-about—and divisive—films at the Cannes Film Festival but, thankfully, it brought Costa to the attention of a growing body of critics. (155 mins, 35mm)

Thanks to Ricardo Matos Cabo for organizing this retrospective.