Directed by Pedro Costa • 1997 • France, Netherlands, Portugal
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.
Up Next in Directed by Pedro Costa
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In Vanda’s Room
Directed by Pedro Costa • 2000 • Germany, Portugal, Switzerland
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 inti...
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Colossal Youth
Directed by Pedro Costa • 2006 • France, Portugal, Switzerland
Starring Ventura, Vanda Duarte, Paula BarrulasMany 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. ...