Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa (4-DVD)

Collector's set includes:

• Ossos (1997) - After a suicidal teenage girl gives birth, she misguidedly entrusts her baby's safety to the troubled, deadbeat father. The first film in Pedro Costa's transformative trilogy about Fontainhas, an impoverished quarter of Lisbon, Ossos is a tale of young lives torn apart by desperation.
• In Vanda's Room (2000) - With the intimate feel of a documentary and the texture of a Vermeer painting, Pedro Costa's In Vanda's Room takes an unflinching, fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalized people, but is centered around the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte.
• Colossal Youth (2006) - Many of the lost souls of Ossos and In Vanda's Room return in the spectral landscape of Colossal Youth, which brings to Pedro Costa's Fontainhas films a new theatrical, tragic grandeur. This time, Costa focuses on Ventura, an elderly immigrant from Cape Verde living in Lisbon.

Disc Features

• Ossos,, newly restored in high-definition, and In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth remastered from the digital camera originals, all under the supervision of director Pedro Costa
• New video conversations between Costa and filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin about Ossos and Colossal Youth
• New audio commentary for In Vanda's Room featuring Costa and Gorin
• New selected-scene audio commentary for Colossal Youth with critic Cyril Neyrat and author-philosopher Jacques Rancière
• Video interviews with critic João Bénard da Costa and cinematographer Emmanuel Machuel about Ossos
• New video essay by artist Jeff Wall on Ossos
• All Blossoms Again, a feature-length documentary on Costa, Colossal Youth, and the director's relationship to Fontainhas
• Tarrafal and The Rabbit Hunters, two short films by Costa
• Little Boy Male, Little Girl Female, a video installation piece by Costa featuring outtakes from In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth
• Galleries of photos by Mariana Viegas and Richard Dumas
• Theatrical trailers for In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth
• New and improved English subtitle translations of all the films
• PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by critics Cyril Neyrat, Ricardo Matos Cabo, Luc Sante, Thom Andersen, and Mark Peranson, as well as a reprint by Bernard Eisenschitz

As issued by The Criterion Collection, this set brings together a trilogy of features helmed in the 1990s and 2000s by the Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa -- titles uniformly responsible for putting Costa on the map. All of the works in question are stark dramas, slow and understated ad extremis per Costa's style, and all deal with the desperation of those living in the dregs of society. Of this set, the 1997 OSSOS tells of an initially suicidal young woman whose infant child gets snatched up by her ne'er-do-well boyfriend, prompting the mother to attempt to get the child back; the three-hour IN VANDA'S ROOM (2000) tells of an addict named Vanda who consumes vast quantities of drugs and sells vegetables to support herself; and the 2006 COLOSSAL YOUTH resurrects characters from the prior two films, including Ventura from OSSOS and Vanda from VANDA'S ROOM, in its grim look at citizens struggling to survive in the slums of Casal Boba, Portugal. Bonus supplements include conversations between Costa and director Jean-Pierre Gorin about OSSOS and YOUTH, Costa's video installation piece "Little Boy Male, Little Girl Female," photo galleries by Richard Dumas and Mariana Viegas, theatrical trailers for YOUTH and ROOM, and much more.