"If there is a cinema of the dispossessed, then its hero has to be the Portuguese film-maker Pedro Costa. His static, austere and often dreamlike movies – unfolding in a mysterious, forbidding semi-darkness – are about marginalised souls, often those in the impoverished (and now demolished) Fontaínhas shantytown in Lisbon. His new film once again reminded me of the pure Beckettian bleakness and starkness in his work: its characters are lonely unsmiling people living below the poverty line who have endured much. Their material wretchedness is not endowed with a condescending nobility but with a serenely laconic self-reliance. Costa and cinematographer Leonardo Simões have composed strangely compelling images of crumbling walls and shadowy, tatty interiors, picked out with fierce key lights to give them an almost modernist look, as if they were studio sets. ..."
NY Times - ‘Vitalina Varela’ Review: A Widow Grieves in Endless Night (Video)
Variety - Locarno Film Review: ‘Vitalina Varela’
2010 May: Pedro Costa
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