Pedro Costa

  • Pedro Costa – The Rabbit Hunters (2007)

    Pedro Costa2001-2010ArthousePortugalShort Film

    Synopsis
    This is the short Pedro Costa made for the Jeonju Digital Project in 2007. Pedro Costa brings Ventura who is the main character of his previous film, Colossal Youth to this film again and telling about being divested and being alienated of the people who don’t have anything. Alfredo is dumped by his wife after losing his job. Ventura is just comforting him with words. Jose is ordered to quit the country. These three men just have a mean reality seeing the high buildings outside and thinking about their happy days.Read More »

  • Pedro Costa – Vitalina Varela (2019)

    2011-2020ArthouseDramaPedro CostaPortugal

    Quote:
    A Cape Verdean woman navigates her way through Lisbon, following the scanty physical traces her deceased husband left behind and discovering his secret, illicit life.Read More »

  • Pedro Costa & Thierry Lounas – Où gît votre sourire enfoui? AKA Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (2001)

    2001-2010DocumentaryFrancePedro CostaPoliticsThierry Lounas

    Documentary about Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. While Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub assemble the third version of “Sicilia!”, Pedro Costa films a “reassembly comedy.” Behind their patience at work, tender and violent, the two filmmakers reveal a certain idea of the cinema, their cinema and their married life. Pedro Costa takes us to the center of his own cinema, in a unique space-time trip, and offers cinephiles the most beautiful gift he can dream of: participating in the interior, in the act of cinematic creation.
    Read More »

  • Pedro Costa & Thierry Lounas – 6 Bagatelas AKA 6 Bagatelles (2001)

    2001-2010DocumentaryFrancePedro CostaShort FilmThierry Lounas

    In 6 Bagatelles (6 Bagatelas), Pedro Costa takes unused scenes from his 2001 documentary on Staub and Huillet, Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (Oû gît votre sourire enfoui?) and edits them into a new context.Read More »

  • Pedro Costa – Ossos AKA Bones (1997)

    Arthouse1991-2000CultPedro CostaPortugal

    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.Read More »

  • Pedro Costa – No Quarto da Vanda AKA In Vanda’s Room (2000)

    1991-2000DocumentaryDramaPedro CostaPortugal

    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 CollectionRead More »

  • Pedro Costa – Ne change rien (2009)

    2001-2010DocumentaryPedro CostaPerformancePortugal

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    In Ne change rien, we see the French actress/singer Jeanne Balibar rehearsing, recording, performing and practicing with a singing coach for an opera bouffe by Jacques Offenbach. The Portuguese director Pedro Costa, a friend of Balibar’s who did the camera work himself, filmed her in long, static shots in which all attention is focused on her performance. This film, shot digitally, shows how versatile Balibar is. Costa also manages to portray the creative process, for instance in a scene in which Balibar and her guitarist Rodolphe Burger try out several variations of a song. Costa’s intimate portrait of the singer is filmed in black-and-white. Costa, who is celebrating his 50th birthday this year and who made his debut in 1989 with the feature O sangue, has seen many of his films screened in Rotterdam over the years.Read More »

  • Pedro Costa – O Sangue AKA Blood (1989)

    1981-1990ArthouseDramaPedro CostaPortugal

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Vicente, seventeen, lives with brother Nino, ten-years-old, and his ailing father in a derelict house on the outskirts of the capital. They don’t seem to remember their mother, and are very much attached to their father, despite his temper, and his frequent absences from home. One day, the father leaves for good, and Vicente and Nino swear to cover it up. It’s their secret. Clara, the primary school assistant, is fascinatingly beautiful, and secretive, and (may be) she knows it aswel. There are other secrets, though: the origin of the money that appears at Vicente’s house; the relationship between Vicente’s well-to-do uncle and his girlfriend; the relationship between the four people who once played the cards together, and now can’t stand each other.Read More »

  • Pedro Costa – Cavalo Dinheiro AKA Horse Money (2014)

    2011-2020ArthousePedro CostaPortugal

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Quote:
    A phantasmagorical vision of psychological purgatory, Horse Money (Cavalo dinheiro) will enrapture some while leaving others dangling in frustrated limbo. Only the sixth fictional feature from Portuguese writer-director Pedro Costa in the quarter-century since his 1989 debut Blood, its austere opacity will convert few to the Costa cause. But it will undoubtedly confirm his exalted status among cinephiles and cineastes as an inspirationally uncompromising and uncompromised auteur.

    Winner of Best Director at Locarno and confirmed for North American festival play at Toronto and New York, this tenebrous meander around one man’s troubled psyche will likely emulate its predecessor Colossal Youth (2006) by scoring limited theatrical exposure in receptive territories off the back of what is, by this stage regarding Costa, near-automatic critical adulation.Read More »

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