catalogue 2007 en .pdf - Festival international du documentaire de ...

MICHEL TREGAN“Juventude em marcha!”, “Forward Youth!”). The story began with Le Sang, in which Nino,11 years old, is the object of some strange trafficking. It continues in Ossos, in which avery young father seems ready to give up his baby to just anyone – a nurse, a friend,death. The progeny we invent and then carry like a burden, that we take on or that weabandon, that we walk from life to death, the family history in delirium, “the childghost”:this is fiction according to Costa – his first work as a filmmaker was a series of children’sfilms for Portuguese television. One can comprehend the allegory: giving birth is the onlymasterpiece granted to the poor, and the excess of progeny is the proof that any life isconnected to the superfluous, even if it is the fatality of a cumbersome newborn.Why then has he returned to this mythological screenplay after having neglected it forten years? The answer is simple and given in the title of the film (in French: En avant,jeunesse): Costa wanted to entrust Ventura with the destiny of youth, the challenge of“Forward” (en avant) that shifts the lines of the framework in which the fallen prince regallytakes his place. The referral is simultaneously the arbitrary of fiction, its invention, andthe means by which the film gives its desire of art to its documentary truth, the peoplethrown out of his house that Ventura alone controlled.To conclude, it is not without logic that Cahiers du Cinéma and FID have now organizedthis presentation of Pedro Costa’s body of work. This is the year that the festival hasopened itself to fiction and the moment when this director has completed a cycle: hedirected three films up to the break after Ossos, and three films since then; he has gonefrom fiction to documentary and from documentary to fiction; he has followed the footstepsof his beginnings. He is now at a crossroads. Painting indicates a peak; the white wallsof the new quarter indicate another: their nudity is no doubt void of history, but at leastit appears to be the promise of a future. Long and profitable were the years that Costaspent in his room, modulating his works and their absences, burnishing his weapons,listening to the rise, photogram by photogram, of the lyricism of the grinder in Sicilia! Letus grab our rifles, bullets and grenades! The filmmaker is facing the wall. Will his nextfilm jump outside?Emmanuel Burdeau, chief-editor of Cahiers du CinémaTranslated by Anna Harrison130