Lost in Criterion

We start a box set from director Pedro Costa this week. "Letters from Fontainhas" contains three of Costa's films set in the impoverished Lisbon neighborhood of Fontainhas. Ossos (1997) is our first, and the closest to a traditional film. While "closest" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, the others move from outright narrative fiction to something more accurately labeled "docufiction" or even "ethnofiction", a fictionalized ethnography. We'll talk more about that aspect in the rest of the series, but for now we have Ossos which is a beautiful film.