Quote:
The first film in Pedro Costa’s transformative trilogy about Fontainhas, an impoverished quarter of Lisbon, Ossos is a tale of young lives torn apart by desperation. After a suicidal teenage girl gives birth, she misguidedly entrusts her baby’s safety to the troubled, deadbeat father, whose violent actions take the viewer on a tour of the foreboding, crumbling shantytown in which they live. With its reserved, shadowy cinematography by Emmanuel Machuel (who collaborated with Bresson on L’argent), Ossos is a haunting look at a devastated community.

Ossos/Bones is Pedro Costa’s third feature film and signals the further shift of his work into the lives of migrant communities. After shooting Casa de Lava/Down to Earth (1995) in Cape Verde, where he used members of migrant communities as characters for the first time, and non-professional actors share the screen with the protagonist (Inês de Medeiros), Costa set his crew in the unchartered territory of the Fontainhas’ slum. Arriving there with messages from friends and relatives back in Cape Verde, Costa finds the residents as powerful and as neglected as those who had contributed to his previous film in the Cape: “These people have already been fooled by everything, by the land, by the ghosts, by the Portuguese. They can’t be fooled by cinema. I tried to respect the truth….”

3.51GB | 1h 37mn | 1200×720 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/44D39EA39C8DF0B/Ossos.1997.720p.WEBRip.x264-MaZ.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/AA96D3F6961C11C/Ossos.1997.720p.WEBRip.x264-MaZ.srt

Language:Portuguese
Subtitles:English

The post Pedro Costa – Ossos AKA Bones (1997) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
For the extraordinarily beautiful second film in his Fontainhas trilogy, Pedro Costa jettisoned his earlier films’ larger crews to burrow even deeper into the Lisbon ghetto and the lives of its desperate inhabitants. With the intimate feel of a documentary and the texture of a Vermeer painting, In Vanda’s Room takes an unflinching, fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalized people, but is centered around the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte. Costa presents the daily routines of Vanda and her neighbors with disarming matter-of-factness, and through his camera, individuals whom many would deem disposable become vivid and vital. This was Costa’s first use of digital video, and the evocative images he created remain some of the medium’s most astonishing.—The Criterion Collection

Quote:
Pedro Costa’s longest and most challenging film (2000) is also the one in which he most fully discovers his present method (shooting beautifully composed tableaux without camera movement in digital video, with scripted dialogue) and subject matter (immigrants from Cape Verde and junkies, all nonprofessional actors playing themselves, inhabiting hovels in a Lisbon slum that are audibly and visibly being razed). The title heroine, who lives with her mother and sister, spends most of her time getting stoned or selling vegetables door-to-door, and we get to know the daily rituals of many of her neighbors equally well. Sandwiched between Costa’s Bones (1997) and Colossal Youth (2006), which feature some of the same people and settings, as well as comparably exquisite lighting and employment of color, this is passionate and demanding chamber cinema of a very special kind. In Portuguese with subtitles. 178 min. – Jonathan Rosenbaum

2.44GB | 2h 50mn | 706×529 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/0618226F12A0A70/No.Quarto.da.Vanda.2000.Criterion.DVDRip.x264.mkv

Language:Portuguese
Subtitles:English

The post Pedro Costa – No Quarto da Vanda AKA In Vanda’s Room (2000) first appeared on Cinema of the World.