Perhaps a complete retrospective—six features and three shorts—seems premature for a director you probably haven’t heard of, but after the unanticipated success of his latest feature Colossal Youth at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, Pedro Costa has come to be recognized as one of the world’s great film-makers. His obsessive theme is the lives of the poor migrants who live in the slums of Lisbon, many of them immigrants from Cape Verde. Costa’s films transcend others on similar subjects because of his rigor, his knowledge of classical cinema (it seems to be in his blood), the amazing beauty of the images and the precision of the cutting, the unprecedented intimacy of his portraits, his extreme patience (twelve months of shooting for In Vanda’s Room, fifteen months for Colossal Youth), and his willingness to take risks that can leave viewers baffled or fascinated or both. For those who get past the initial difficulties, his films can inspire an obsessive devotion. – Thom Andersen, California Institute of the Arts