White credits appear, in silence, on a black background. A busy but gentle murmur of voices, vehicles and nocturnal shufflings fades up. Then an image appears. It contains none of the sources of the sounds we can hear; instead, the camera looks up from an empty courtyard at the back walls of a collection of decrepit buildings, lit by a dim grey light. The sky and the borders of the image are jet black. Densely packed in on each other, most of the buildings are punctured by dark, blank windows. A chest of drawers appears at one of the first-floor windows. Someone pushes it all the way out; it falls with a violent crash on the ground one storey below. Other items of furniture follow: a single drawer; what might be a bedside cabinet; a chair; something that looks like a door. At the window we can just barely make out the figure responsible for these expulsions.

So begins Pedro Costa's 2006 film Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth). We later realise that the figure in the shadows is Clotilde, wife of the film's protagonist, Ventura. Clotilde has kicked her husband out and proceeded, for good measure, to destroy his furniture. It is not uncommon for a film to begin with a domestic situation, an image of home that is then somehow disrupted – whether this image is of a comfortable (if a little indifferent) home, as in Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999) or one that is from the outset uncomfortable and unsettling, as in Lost Highway. Colossal Youth does indeed begin with a domestic situation, but Costa represents it only via multiple displacements. We never see inside Ventura and Clotilde's home, nor do we see anything of Ventura's expulsion itself. Instead, the expulsion of the furniture serves as a metonym for the displacement of Ventura. Ventura's displacement could easily be seen as a metaphor for the wider story of the displacement of the inhabitants of the neighbourhood of Lisbon called Fontainhas. Between 2001 and 2005, the overwhelmingly Cape Verdean population (96.5 per cent) were expelled from their homes, which were certainly ramshackle but also (if only ambivalently) beloved. The inhabitants were moved into clean and bright but antiseptic and soulless new apartments in Casal da Boba and the old neighbourhood was knocked down (see Treno 2013).