Famed film critic Roger Ebert turned down the chance to watch this movie at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, after discovering his colleague Richard Corliss and his wife had walked out of a screening twenty minutes in. According to Ebert, Mary Corliss said "the movie made her feel like rats were fighting in her skull."
The museum Ventura visits (around 40 minutes in the film) is Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon. The works he looks at are by the Flemish painters Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck, among others.
This film, together with Bones (1997) and In Vanda's Room (2000) (In Vanda's Room), is released by the Criterion Collection in a box set Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa.
Colossal Youth (Portuguese: Colossal Youth (2006), literally "Youth on the March") is a 2006 docufiction feature film directed by Portuguese director Pedro Costa. It was third feature by Costa set in Lisbon's Fontainhas neighborhood [after Bones (1997) and In Vanda's Room (2000) (In Vanda's Room)], and the first to feature the recurring character Ventura.
Colossal Youth (2006) (Colossal Youth) was shot on DV in long, static takes; it also mixes documentary and fiction storytelling. The film is a meditation on the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution and its consequences for Portugal's poverty-stricken Cape Verdean immigrants. It was part of the Official Competition at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.