Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa (Criterion Collection)

Synopsis

One of the most important artists on the international film scene today, Portuguese director Pedro Costa has been steadily building an impressive body of work since the late eighties. And these are the three films that put him on the map: spare, painterly portraits of battered, largely immigrant lives in the slums of Fontainhas, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Lisbon. Hypnotic, controlled works, Ossos, In Vanda’s Room, and Colossal Youth confirm Costa as a provocative new cinematic poet, one who locates beauty in the most unlikely of places.

Collector's set includes

Ossos

Pedro Costa, 1997

After a suicidal teenage girl gives birth, she misguidedly entrusts her baby’s safety to the troubled, deadbeat father. 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.

In Vanda's Room

Pedro Costa, 2000

With the intimate feel of a documentary and the texture of a Vermeer painting, Pedro Costa’s 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.

Colossal Youth

Pedro Costa, 2006

Many of the lost souls of Ossos and In Vanda’s Room return in the spectral landscape of Colossal Youth, which brings to Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas films a new theatrical, tragic grandeur. This time, Costa focuses on Ventura, an elderly immigrant from Cape Verde living in Lisbon.

Disc Features

DIRECTOR-APPROVED FOUR-DVD SET:

• Ossos,, newly restored in high-definition, and In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth remastered from the digital camera originals, all under the supervision of director Pedro Costa
• New video conversations between Costa and filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin about Ossos and Colossal Youth
• New audio commentary for In Vanda’s Room featuring Costa and Gorin
• New selected-scene audio commentary for Colossal Youth with critic Cyril Neyrat and author-philosopher Jacques Rancière
• Video interviews with critic João Bénard da Costa and cinematographer Emmanuel Machuel about Ossos
• New video essay by artist Jeff Wall on Ossos
• All Blossoms Again, a feature-length documentary on Costa, Colossal Youth, and the director’s relationship to Fontainhas
• Tarrafal and The Rabbit Hunters, two short films by Costa
• Little Boy Male, Little Girl Female, a video installation piece by Costa featuring outtakes from In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth
• Galleries of photos by Mariana Viegas and Richard Dumas
• Theatrical trailers for In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth
• New and improved English subtitle translations of all the films
• PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by critics Cyril Neyrat, Ricardo Matos Cabo, Luc Sante, Thom Andersen, and Mark Peranson, as well as a reprint by Bernard Eisenschitz

30 Mar 2010

DVD Box Set

4 Discs

SRP: $79.95

Criterion Store price

$63.96