Colossal Youth

Colossal Youth (, 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. Plot "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..." 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.