Colossal Youth

No one composes images like Pedro Costa. Paradoxically, he is a minimalist who is not afraid to try anything, and consequently this film has divided audiences all around the world since its premiere in competition at Cannes. Costa has used the stories of the marginalised people he has befriended and who now appear in his films. Ventura, a Cape Verdean immigrant in Portugal, has had his apartment trashed by his wife (or a strange woman with her face) and spends his days moving between the fringe dwellers he calls his children, while negotiating to get one of the bare white-walled apartments that are replacing Lisbon’s slums. The long takes, low camera angles, intricate patches of light and shade in which the characters play out their deeply personal stories, construct a world that is larger than life even as it contains so little. This is not a film for the faint-hearted, as each shot in Costa’s world is an adventure which could lead anywhere.

it is a brave and nightmarishly beautiful achievement, in which marginalized people who so rarely have a voice in cinema are given one, unbound by the shackles of sanctimony or self-important “social realism.”

LA Weekly