Colo, Teresa Villaverde, Portugal-France, 2017, 136’*
In May 2016 we asked ourselves a question that demanded an answer: “Why are we not familiar with the films of Lisbon director (1966) Teresa Villaverde?” We responded with a retrospective dedicated to her work, which we completed with a visit by the director to our cinema to present one of the sessions. Now that we know her, we are constantly drawn to her new work.
Figurehead, along with Pedro Costa, of the so-called third generation of Portuguese cinema, she is an ever-present at the international festivals and her films soon established a style and cinematographic universe of their own, as we saw in the screenings of Três Irmãos (1994 ), Os Mutantes (1998) and Transe (2006). Now we complete the review of her work with the screening of her latest film, presented in the official section of the Berlinale this year.
The abiding themes are still there: anguish, tension, visual force, characters pushed to their limits and exploration of the possibilities and boundaries of cinema ... And in this case they are employed for the telling of a typical everyday story of a family suffering the consequences of the economic crisis: the father unemployed, the mother with double shifts, and a teenage daughter on the run.
In the words of the director herself, “Colo is a very contemporary and serene reflection on the path that European societies are taking; about our isolation; about our perplexity in the face of the difficulties that arise; about our lives in the city and within our families.”
*Sessions on December 23 (VOSE) and December 29 (VOSE + VOSEU)
In the words of the director herself, “Colo is a very contemporary and serene reflection on the path that European societies are taking; about our isolation; about our perplexity in the face of the difficulties that arise; about our lives in the city and within our families.