CASA DE LAVA

“While Casa de lava remains an adventure film, with a strange incursion into a world that rejects it despite its desire for fusion, and although the fictional and romantic influence of Bowles, Rimbaud, Desnos, even Rossellini (Stromboli) can be felt, Costa plays down the story of a classical loss-of-self to privilege a materialist rendering of the elements. As if the fictional structure of the film were spellbound, to the point of being stripped, almost bare, by the volcanic rock of Cape Verde. A telluric film, Casa de lava is a fertile confrontation between a Western imaginary and an almost obsessively precise recording of a land that resists it. And everything happens as if the brilliant young filmmaker of Sang was laying down his inadequate arms at the feet of the biting beauty of a magical world that whispers a thousand languages, laden with all its primitive weight. Costa makes his defeat the underlying subject of his film, and his finest victory.”
(Frédéric Bonnaud, La Rochelle International Film Festival catalogue – 2001)