“It's no exaggeration to say that Colossal Youth was the single most divisive film at Cannes in 2006.” - LA Weekly

Mining material from his films Bones and In Vanda's Room, filmmaker Pedro Costa revisits the Cape Verdean slums of Lisbon to create this cascading semi-documentary whittled down from 320 hours of footage to two and a half. He follows Ventura, one of the last to be moved from the slums to a clinical apartment block. Ventura's story is also that of those around him, various men and women (possibly even his children) who have burdens to verbally unload on him.

The LA Weekly describes Costa's work as “a harsh, nightmarish and often terribly beautiful film set against a world of peeling paint and crudely nailed planks, through which moves this solitary man grasping at the flickering embers of some real or imagined past… It is quite unlike anything that you or I have ever seen before.”