Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas Trilogy—Ossos (1997), No Quarto da Vanda (2000), and Juventude em Marcha (2006)—offers a unique approach to the experience of uprooting and exclusion in contemporary Lisbon. Through a minimalist and collaborative aesthetic, the filmmaker constructs a bodily archive that highlights the precariousness of the inhabitants of Fontainhas, a predominantly Cape Verdean migrant community. His approach avoids both exoticism and the aestheticization of suffering, placing bodies as active narrators of memories, struggles, and resistance.Each film articulates a specific dimension of this living archive: in Ossos, bodies embody the vulnerability of daily survival; in No Quarto da Vanda, confinement and addiction reveal the inscription of pain in the intimate; and in Juventude em Marcha, Ventura’s walk bears witness to the loss of territory and the persistence of collec...

Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas Trilogy—Ossos (1997), No Quarto da Vanda (2000), and Juventude em Marcha (2006)—offers a unique approach to the experience of uprooting and exclusion in contemporary Lisbon. Through a minimalist and collaborative aesthetic, the filmmaker constructs a bodily archive that highlights the precariousness of the inhabitants of Fontainhas, a predominantly Cape Verdean migrant community. His approach avoids both exoticism and the aestheticization of suffering, placing bodies as active narrators of memories, struggles, and resistance.Each film articulates a specific dimension of this living archive: in Ossos, bodies embody the vulnerability of daily survival; in No Quarto da Vanda, confinement and addiction reveal the inscription of pain in the intimate; and in Juventude em Marcha, Ventura’s walk bears witness to the loss of territory and the persistence of collec...