Costa Caro
BYRON GAGO
Red Circle · 2015
Costa Caro grew out of a year-long relationship of mutual trust with Hosni (31, of Tunisian origin) and Mustafa (22, Egyptian). Built in two chapters, the film traces the lives of its two protagonists as witnesses to a reality weighed down by the absence of any future. They are two paths drawn from one condition, diverging as they go. A dualism runs through it: between the two men, and between their lives and their surroundings, held in Mustafa's double position as a lawyer in Egypt and a drug dealer in Italy. The protagonists speak their emotions and desires directly to camera, intercut with fragments of daily life, in a post-immigration setting where every figure is bound to the others by a single necessity: survival.
The film is more its subjects' than its early texts suggested. The two-chapter structure was not a frame imposed on their lives. It was the form Hosni and Mustafa proposed when the three of us sat down to decide what the film should be. A year of relationship preceded the first frame, and the knowledge the film holds was made between them, in their own words, before it was ever made for an audience. What the camera receives is people in time, not types: a relationship that develops, intersects, and parts.
Mustafa's life is named in the early texts as a paradox: qualified as a lawyer in one country, criminalised as a dealer in another. But this is not a personal contradiction; it is the predictable outcome of a labour market that refuses non-EU credentials and then criminalises the survival economies that refusal produces. He called it a paradoja, and I let his word become mine. I should have held both at once: Mustafa may call his life a paradox; the system that produced his condition does not have the right to use the same word. Filmed in San Giovanni a Teduccio, in Naples, the work keeps those structures present as its absent third subject: the Bossi-Fini law, the timing of the permesso di soggiorno, the exclusion from legal work.
Hosni and Mustafa wanted the film to be about them as people, not as cases, so the structures are never captioned on screen. The compromise we reached was their lives in their own words, the system present but unspoken. I now think it should at least have been named in the materials that travelled with the film, even while the film itself kept their request. Costa Caro is the rare work where that line, between portraying a person and exposing a case, had to be drawn with the people on the other side of the camera, not after them.
"This is not paradox; it is a structural consequence of immigration exclusion. Framing this as a personal paradox rather than a systemic outcome risks individualising a structural condition and aestheticising the harm."
Critical review, 2026
The critic is correct, and the correction matters. I used "paradox" because it was how Mustafa first described his own life to me, and I let his framing become the film's. The framing is sympathetic to him, but it does the political work of individualising what is structural. What I should have held is both at once: Mustafa is entitled to call his life a paradox; the system that produced his condition is not.
Costa Caro
2015
Direct address
- Video — HD, stereo sound, 36'41"
- Hosni, speaking to camera
01 / 05
The work's authority is the relationship that made it. Hosni and Mustafa consented in writing before each chapter was shot, have seen the finished film, and share in any honoraria it earns from screenings. Small, but the structure is real. The two-chapter form was theirs to propose, and the relationship did not close when the film did: it continued past it. In a documentary economy that routinely leaves its subjects behind, Costa Caro tried to be a work its subjects could stay inside.
It is the only portrait in the practice made through sustained relationship, and it marks a turning point. What followed was a move toward landscape and material installation, a turn that was partly an admission: the relational depth this film required could not be sustained honestly across a multi-year practice. One good portrait film, and then the work the practice can carry without claiming a depth it cannot give again.
Costa Caro is one of the works that operate under different rules. Where Telamone recorded a sleeping body that had not agreed to be filmed, this work is built from the opposite premise: consent in writing, shared credit, a structure its subjects proposed. If Telamone is the necessary mistake the archive keeps, Costa Caro is the rule that mistake taught: that any work about other people has to be made with them, over time, or not made at all.
Costa Caro
2015
The absent third subject
- Video — HD, stereo sound, 36'41"
- Structures present, never captioned
01 / 03
