Casa de Lava

A worker from Cape Verde falls from scaffolding on a building site in Portugal and goes into a coma. He stays in hospital for months and nobody asks after him. The hospital decides to send him back to his country. The nurse Mariana travels with him. They reach the island of Fogo: volcanic, black soiled, a place most people have left. His family cannot be found. Mariana stays on the island and does not go back. Pedro Costa writes and directs. It is his second film and the beginning of his long relationship with Cape Verde; most of his later films take place inside the Cape Verdean community in Lisbon. Its starting point is a classic: Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie. Costa uses the same structure; a nurse, a patient and a foreign woman arriving on an island. The narrative builds no plot; Mariana walks about the island, talks to people, and does not know herself why she is staying. The island is real and most of those seen are its people; during the shoot Costa abandoned the script and changed it according to what he heard there. Colonialism is constantly behind: the workers who went from the island to Portugal, those sent back and those left behind. Who it is for: viewers who like Portuguese cinema and slow films that explain nothing. Who it is not for: the narrative is unclear, the pace is very slow, and the characters' decisions are nowhere accounted for.