Vancouver Dispatch. 3.

VIFF programme associate Mark Peranson has been flying the flag for Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth ever since Cannes. He devoted ten pages of Cinema Scope magazine to a retrospective interview with the Portugese filmmaker, with more to come, and even produced a limited edition Vote for Pedro T-shirt. (Full disclosure: I have one myself.)

Apparently, Costa took a dim view of such fripperies when he spotted a couple of festival volunteers sporting them. Nevertheless, here he was, this dour-looking man, on hand to introduce a 9pm screening of what Peranson promised would be "a film like no other in the festival." "For me, it is like a silent film. Only with talking," Costa said. Adding: "We will talk about it after - if you're still here."

Two hours and 35 minutes later, most of us wanted to hear more, and the subsequent Q&A went on until 1am. It was almost as stimulating as the movie itself.

Colossal Youth (the English title comes from an album by Young Marble Giants) takes place in the same slum neighborhood as Costa's previous Ossos and In Vanda's Room. Vanda herself reappears here, and apparently there are other familiar faces for those in the know. But the film is dominated by the tall, graceful black man Ventura, an emigrant from Cape Verde who came to Portugal as a laborer 30 years ago.

Costa's scenes generally consist of a single, static take, each a discreet vignette, a piece in the puzzle which only reveals its meaning(s) as things fall into place over time. Fact and fiction, memory and rumination commingle as Ventura tries to put his broken family back together. I'd describe the style as magical neo-realist, as long as we can agree to expunge any whimsical connotations from that term. What I'm getting at is, how else can you describe a ghost story inspired by a social housing project?

Ventura will soon take up an empty room in this new apartment block, but he wants to ensure there is space there for his children. The housing officer is confused. There is nothing on the form about Ventura having children. How many does he have? "I don't know yet," the old man replies.

In the film's most touching episodes, Ventura composes a letter home for his illiterate friend to memorize, a love poem that grows longer and more regretful every time we hear it.

So: you could call this film a meditation on post-colonialism; a work-force that is an underclass; families living apart... but it's hard to think of another filmmaker who has taken the old saw about the personal being political so much to heart as Costa.

The film took more than two years to shoot, he said afterwards. "Every filmmaker in this festival will tell you it's hard to get the money to make a film," he said. "But it's bullshit. It's not true." He paused and rebuked someone at the front. "You shouldn't laugh," he said. "It's the whole problem."

Costa shoots on DV (the results are as sculpted as anything by Tarkovsky) in actual locations with a crew of five or six and actors who respond to and share in his commitment. "The trick is getting the weight right, the balance between the people in front of and behind the camera," he said. "They must be the same weight." Filmmaking has become lop-sided towards the production crew, in other words. It wasn't that way for John Ford or Jacques Tourneur, he said. When did you ever pause to think how much My Darling Clementine cost to make? Tourneur was a master of sensitivity and discretion.

Costa might take a week to get a single take, honing and reducing the scene. A shot could take a month to get it just so - sometimes they would shoot up to 80 takes. And then, after some three months have passed, they might reshoot the scene again. "I find the actors subconsciously edit out the sentimentality the second time around," he said.

Composing a shot was easy for him. If you cannot do that, what business do you have making films? "The problem for me is how long [to hold the shot]. It is the problem for films today - the good ones: durée. Finding the music of it."

It was, as I say, a stimulating discussion, and it brought out the best in the Vancouver congregants, many of whom I suspect came out converted - and looking forward to the Costa retrospective the Vancity Film Centre is scheduling sometime next year.

Posted by dwhudson at October 6, 2006 1:20 PM