Tuesday,
May 6 – Saturday, May 10
Still
Lives: The Films of Pedro Costa
 Pedro
Costa is a filmmaker whose work has been inspiring raptures
at film festivals across the world for years. Nevertheless he
is a nearly unknown quantity in the US, where screenings of
his films have been few and far between. Colossal Youth,
his most recent feature, fresh from Cannes, Toronto, Rotterdam
and other major film festivals, gaining Costa an increasing
number of devotees. A comprehensive retrospective of his work
traveled throughout North America this past year. Film
@ International House is thrilled to host this long over-due
retrospective, as well as to give Colossal Youth its
Philadelphia premiere.
"To
say that Pedro Costa is one of the world’s greatest filmmakers
might sound like a provocation. But I have said it, and will
repeat it: Pedro Costa is one of the world’s greatest filmmakers,
at the very least one of the most relevant, and there is nothing
willfully perverse in my statement. Final judgment should be
left up to the audience – to whom Costa yields so much – and
can only follow from seeing his films. Watching Costa’s work
gives me the chills; it’s a most mysterious, unusual, and unclassifiable
oeuvre, one littered with ghosts of the past and the present.”
– Mark Peranson, Cinemascope
"I
think that Costa is genuinely great.” – Jacques Rivette
Very
special thanks to Pedro Costa, Ricardo Matos Cabo, James Quandt
(Cinematheque Ontario), Mark Peranson (Vancouver International
Film Centre), Tom Vick (The Smithsonian Institution) and Rebecca
Meyer and Mark Johnson (Harvard Film Archive).
Tuesday,
May 6 at 7pm
The
Blood (O Sangue)
dir.
Pedro Costa, Portugal, 1989, 35mm, 95 mins, b/w, Portuguese
w/ English subtitles
 O
Sangue is undoubtedly
one of the most remarkable film debuts of the last 20 years.
Filmed in milky black and white, each shot is so carefully composed
the film could well be a montage of a thousand photos were it
not for the emotive, intelligent dialogue, dreamy orchestral
score and excellent use of pop music. This magical melodrama
tells the story of two young brothers and a young kindergarten
teacher on the run from some nasty criminals, a mean uncle and
possibly the law. In what seems to be continuous nighttime,
shimmering light reflections play on the characters’ faces,
only enhancing the romantic feel… it is probably the only Costa
film… to reference other cinema – the 1950s teen dramas of Nicholas
Ray, as well as Badlands and The Night of the
Hunter.
O
Sangue mixes the pop with the intellectual-political,
assuredly blending the boundaries. – Michelle Carey, Senses
of Cinema
preceded
by
Ne
Change Rien
dir.
Pedro Costa, Portugal, 2005, BetaSP, 13 mins, color
…Costa’s
remarkable short Ne Change Rien, starring the actress
Jeanne Balibar in a trio of musical sequences that progress
from the intimacy of a dressing room to the blinding stage lights
of a crowded arena. It is said by Costa to be part of a larger
work in progress, the full nature of which one can only imagine.
– Scott Foundas
Wednesday,
May 7 at 7pm
Down
To Earth (Casa de Lava)
dir.
Pedro Costa, Portugal, 1994, 35mm, 110 mins, color, Portuguese
w/ English subtitles
 In
Casa de Lava, an old violin-player (played by Portuguese
musician Raul Andrade) muses, ‘We ought to die as children and
be born old.’ Nurse Mariana has come to Cape Verde from Portugal
to accompany a young, comatose worker (injured on a Lisbon worksite)
back to his country and family. Not only does nobody seem interested
in claiming the body, but Mariana becomes entangled in the lives
of the mysterious inhabitants of the small village, especially
Edite (Edith Scob, always brilliant). Casa de Lava
is a pivotal film in Costa’s filmography as it is the first
in which he depicts the lives of the Cape Verdians who will
populate most of his subsequent films. Like O Sangue,
his second feature is full of images that haunt – for instance,
Edite embracing the dog she has just killed on the black sand
– but in it Costa’s style has become less romantic, more austere,
and the people more isolated. – Michelle Carey, Senses of
Cinema
preceded
by
Tarrafal
dir.
Pedro Costa, Portugal, 2007, 35mm, 16 mins, color, Portuguese
w/ English subtitles
In
Tarrafal, Costa returns to Cape Verde, the former Portuguese
colony where he set his 1995 film Down To Earth, and
which is also the homeland of his (real-life) leading character
Ventura from Colossal Youth. Costa now looks at the
Tarrafal prison, built in 1936, where for nearly 40 years the
dissidents of Salazar’s dictatorial regime were tortured and
killed. Screened Cannes as part of the collective film The
State of The World, (directed by Costa with five other
filmmakers including Chantal Akerman, Apichatpong Weerasethakul
and Wang Bing).
Thursday,
May 8 at 7pm
Bones
(Ossos)
dir.
Pedro Costa, Portugal, 1997, 35mm, 94 mins, color, Portuguese
w/ English subtitles
 The
setting of Ossos is the Fontainhas district of Lisbon,
a slum populated by Cape Verdean immigrants (a setting to which
Costa would return in both In Vanda’s Room and Colossal
Youth). A young woman becomes a mother and can’t or won’t
take care of her baby. Without the mother’s permission, the
father takes the baby out of the slum and into the city. But
the lead character in the film is neither the mother nor the
father but a housecleaning woman, Clotilde, played by Costa
regular Vanda Duarte. Ossos is the first film of a
loose trilogy – in the second film, In Vanda’s Room,
Duarte plays herself, a heroin addict. Soon afterwards, the
Fontainhas neighborhood was demolished, and a low-income housing
project – the third film, Colossal Youth, deals with
this displacement. – Girish, Girishshambu
Friday
May 9 at 7pm
In
Vanda’s Room (No Quarto da Vanda)
dir.
Pedro Costa, Portugal, 2000, 35mm, 178 mins, color, Portuguese
w/ English subtitles
 The
film is the extraordinary portrait of Vanda, a young drug user
from Fontainhas, the Cape Verdian quarter of Lisbon. Costa shot
the film with a very small DV camera, allowing him to meet his
subject face-to-face, and it’s hard to say whether or not Vanda
was even aware of the camera’s presence. While initially intending
to stay within the confines of Vanda’s room, Costa ultimately
decided to include the rest of the quarter and to complete the
study of ‘another way of living’ with the inhabitants of Fontainhas.
Thus, he creates a seemingly impossible equilibrium between
what lies in front of and what lies behind the camera. – Viennale
Saturday,
May 10 at 2pm
Where
Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (Ondejaz O Teu Sorriso?)
dir.
Pedro Costa, Portugal, 2001, 35mm, 104 mins, color, French w/
English subtitles
This
film portrait presents an extraordinary look into the creative
process of filmmaking through a case study of longtime collaborators
Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, who are carefully observed
at work reediting their recent feature Sicilia!, as
they teach a group of students at the National Studio of Contemporary
Arts in Tourcoing. Costa meticulously records the dialectic,
argumentative mode the filmmakers use to reach decisions about
each cut. In
a
remarkable sequence, the two filmmakers have a standoff in virtual
darkness (Huillet having switched off the Moviola that provides
much of the illumination for Costa’s shooting). Equally compelling
is the documentation of Straub’s close commentary on techniques
from such diverse influences as Chaplin and Eisenstein. This
remarkable documentary, an episode from the landmark series
Cinema of Our Time, is a brilliant examination of the
art of editing and a meditation on the aesthetic and political
implications of film technique. – Harvard Film Archive
followed
by
6
Bagatelas
dir.
Pedro Costa, Portugal, 2001, BetaSP, 18 mins, color, French
w/ English subtitles
In
this short film, Costa puts together six unused scenes from
Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?
Saturday,
May 10 at 7pm
Colossal
Youth (Juventude Em Marcha) – Philadelphia Premiere
dir.
Pedro Costa, Portugal, 2006, 35mm, 155 mins, color, Portuguese
w/ English subtitles
 A
hypnotic, poetic film rooted in harsh social reality, Colossal
Youth is a follow-up to Pedro Costa’s 1997 film Ossos,
set among the underprivileged inhabitants of Fontainhas, Lisbon’s
now defunct Cape Verdean quarter. Colossal Youth follows
Ventura, an elderly ex-laborer who is moving to a new neighborhood.
In a drama comprised of seemingly disconnected tableaux, Ventura
meets assorted Lisbon dwellers, black and white, whom he calls
his children – among them, Vanda, a mother and former heroin
addict (and the protagonist of Costa’s previous film, In
Vanda’s Room.)
Working with spartan technical
resources and a cast of non-professionals unemployed, Costa
uses digital video to produce strikingly stark textures: with
a palette bleached out virtually to black-and-white, the images
seem to be etched on the screen in chalk and charcoal. As austere
as Straub and Huillet, about whom Costa made the documentary
Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, Colossal Youth
is demanding, without a doubt, but also intensely rewarding,
the work of an uncompromising and visionary filmmaker. – Jonathan
Romney, London Film Festival
A
truly incantatory experience, Colossal Youth is an
impressive, often transfixing excavation of emotionally dark
territory, and its duration is directly tied to its overall
shape and impact. It’s a singular vision of underclass existence,
simultaneously decrepit and monumental. – Kent Jones, Film
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