Casa de Lava

With this movie, Aurélien Gerbault invites us to know the portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa and to witness the process of shooting of his movie Colossal Youth (2006). The nature of Costa's cinema is revealed to us: the criation of an intimate space in the hardness of reality.

Laura Rossellini, a widow from Rome, vacations on the Algarve coast one hot summer. One day while sunbathing, she finds a wounded man named Robert drifting in the surf on a rubber raft. She takes him home, and, after he is revived, learns his story. As they talk, their mutual attraction grows, until a group of armed men suddenly arrive looking for Robert.

Lisbon by night, through the eyes of a young woman who lives freely, and a neighbour who follows her everywhere, from a distance.

Undaunted by a commission to make a film about his mentors and aesthetic exemplars, the filmmaking team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Costa records with great sensitivity and insight the exacting process by which the two re-edit their film Sicilia!, discussing and arguing over each cut and its effect. Incorporating comments about the influence of figures as diverse as Chaplin and Eisenstein, about the ethical and aesthetic implications of film technique and such matters as rhythm, sound mixing, and acting. The film becomes a tour de force, immersing us in the mysteries of cinema as practiced by some of its greatest creators. Costa calls the film both his first comedy and his first love story.

One of the most important figures in contemporary cinema, Pedro Costa's celebrated music documentary is a mesmerizing portrait of French actress-turned-singer Jeanne Balibar, a transfixing, cigarette-smoking chanteuse with an intense devotion to her craft. Photographed in shimmering black-and-white and featuring a soundtrack of jazz-inflected pop songs, the film is a luminous exploration of the creative process.

While the young captains lead the revolution in the streets, the people of Fontainhas search for Ventura, lost in the woods.

A participant in a coup d'état by young commissioned officers, Ventura loses his way within the woods. Eventually, Ventura is admitted into a mental hospital where he has conversations with "ghosts" of the past in the hospital's elevator.

Nino, tough but sickly, and his older brother Vicente live in the country with their father. After their father disappears ― we’re never sure why ― murder is suggested. Vicente brings his girlfriend to the house, and a different kind of family is established as the three youngsters grow fiercely protective of each other. But their uncle grows suspicious about the fate of the missing father and forcibly kidnaps Nino, taking him away to the city and leaving Vicente to locate him there.

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.

An unflinching, fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalized people, but taking as main focus the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte.

True story of thirteen totally normal young women that suffered harsh questioning and were put in prison under made up charges of helping the rebellion against Franco back in the 1940s. Despite of their innocence, the thirteen were soon executed without even a trace of evidence of any wrong doing.

A Cape Verdean woman navigates her way through Lisbon, following the scanty physical traces her deceased husband left behind and discovering his secret, illicit life.

In Africa, during the colonial war, a patrol is lost in the bush and a soldier dies in operation. Twelve years later, in Portugal, the soldier family meets in peace.

It is the end of summer and Isabel is a relationship with Diogo. She don't quite know what she wants from her life going forward as her father gets sick.

O Nosso Homem (Our Man) is a short variation in the line of the trilogy Pedro Costa has devoted to the habitants of the Fontainhas quarter, which has been destroyed in the meantime. It can be considered as a sort of appendix to the third part, Juventude en Marcha (Colossal Youth), in which the hero, Ventura, reappears as one of the four characters of this dialogue of hopelessness.

The story of three young Cape Verdean sisters upon their arrival at a foreign European port, in an attempt to escape another devastating eruption of the volcano Fogo. In this unknown country, they roam, hand in hand, evoking their secret fears through music and singing.