Product Details

• Actors: Ventura, Vanda Duarte, Beatriz Duarte, Gustavo Sumpta, Cila Cardoso
• Directors: Pedro Costa
• Writers: Pedro Costa
• Producers: Andres Pfäffli, Elda Guidinetti, Francisco Villa-Lobos, Karl Baumgartner, Paulo Branco
• Format: Box set, Color, DVD, Full Screen, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: Portuguese
• Subtitles: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 4
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: Criterion
• DVD Release Date: March 30, 2010
• Run Time: 425 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B003152Z0O
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #42,480 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

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.

OSSOS: 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.

IN VANDA’S ROOM: 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.

COLOSSAL YOUTH: 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 a low-cost housing complex in Lisbon, who has been abandoned by his wife and spends his days visiting his neighbors, whom he considers his “children.” What results is a form of ghost story, a tale of derelict, dispossessed people living in the past and present at the same time, filmed by Costa with empathy and startling radiance.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pedro Costa's trilogy, July 9, 2010

By 

Frank H. Curtis - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa (DVD)

Pedro Costa allows us to observe the lives of the poor of Fontainhas. It is, what it is. The hacking cough, daly drug use, mundane conversations, are repeated in different stages of family life in such poverty. The cinematography seems much to beautiful for this environment, black and white would seem more appropriate .One of the younger women in the first film is to beautiful for the part.We , as viewers, never get to leave this "ghetto". People leave for work , come home, but we stay ,with the constant coughing ,images of poverty so beautifully filmed.

6 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a very impressive look at poverty, May 28, 2010

By 

Ted "Ted" (Pennsylvania, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa (DVD)

This set includes three films by Pedro Costa taking place in the Lisbon slums of Fontainhas inhabited by immigrants from Cape Verde.

There are 4 discs 3 of them contain films with their own supplements and a 4th disc of supplements

The first film, Ossos, deals with a suicidal pregnant teen who gives the baby to it's father. The supplements are interviews with selected crew, a slide show of pictures relevant to the film and an essay about the film by Jeff Wall.

The second film, In Vanda's Room, is a look at the poverty in the slums and focuses on a heroin addict named Vanda. Supplements include a photo gallery and audio commentary of Costa talking about the film with Jean-Pierre Gorin.

The third film, Colossal Youth, deals with a Cape Verdean immigrant and his move from the slums to public housing. The supplement is Pedro Costa talking with Jean-Pierre Gorin.

The supplements on disc 4 are
a documentary on Costa, two of Costa's short films, "Tarrafal" and "The Rabbit Hunters", and outtakes from In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth.

This is an impressive set and made aware to me that poverty still exists in developed countries at a level I never anticipated. Some of these slums look like ones in the third world.