Colossal Youth (Masters of Cinema)

Across the course of history, only a relative handful of filmmakers can be said to have developed and refined a language of cinematographic expression which, inimitable, belongs to its creator alone. Pedro Costa, of our time, exists within this select group, and Colossal Youth is one of his sublime achievements.

An intimate epic where in present and past move as one, Colossal Youth chronicles Ventura, the towering Cape Verdean who has assumed the role of surrogate "father" to an untold number of characters around Lisbon and its now-razed neighbourhood of Fontaínhas. Through Ventura's ghost-like visitations to figures such as Vanda Duarte (the central personage of Costa's previous In Vanda's Room) and repeated recollections of his past life as a newly migrated manual labourer, Costa explores the nature, and necessity, of storytelling in the course of the human adventure.

As with In Vanda's Room, Colossal Youth lays bare the residence of documentary inside of fiction (and vice-versa) using a digital video aesthetic in which every single image resonates with an indescribably poetic and rarefied force. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Colossal Youth in concert with Costa's complementary short works Tarrafal, The Rabbit Hunters, and Our Man – all for the first time in the UK.

Special Features:

• Director-approved transfer of the feature, presented in its original 25fps playback speed 

• Newly translated optional English subtitles

• New and exclusive 17-minute video piece filmed at the Tate Modern, London, featuring Pedro Costa discussing Colossal Youth

• Original trailer for the film 

• Three shorter works by Pedro Costa which complement Colossal Youth: Tarrafal (2007, 17 minutes); The Rabbit Hunters (2007, 27 minutes); and the first home video release of Costa's most recent work, Our Man (2010, approx. 23 minutes)

• Finding the Criminal (2010, 120 minutes) — a new film by Craig Keller, featuring Pedro Costa in a 2008 conversation with Keller and Andy Rector on the history of cinema, cinema aesthetics, politics, music, and discovery 

• A 56-page full-colour booklet containing writing on the film by French philosopher Jacques Rancière; an essay by the legendary Portuguese critic João Bénard da Costa; a facsimile reproduction of Ventura's letter from the film; and more