PEDRO COSTA at MONKEYTOWN
Among the most insistent voices in contemporary cinema, Pedro Costa is exhibited far too rarely in American theaters. Whether a volcanic landscape or a dilapidated slum, Costa creates a sacred cinematic space on-screen - he presents “nothing” but receives everything. Costa’s is a cinema of reticence, built upon near-still compositions in which the movement of light and shadow are as meaningful as exchanges of dialogue and human gestures. We come into the characters’ lives knowing nothing, and we leave with the experience of having shared time and space with them, once of the most intimate of cinematic encounters. And between now and January 6, you can relish this experience on the big screen at Brooklyn’s MonkeyTown as they screen his second feature, Casa de Lava (1994), in which a nurse’s trip to Cape Verde with a patient becomes a surreal cross-cultural odyssey, and Colossal Youth (2006), his most recent film about slum dwellers in Lisbon.
