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IN VANDA’S ROOM
No quarto da Vanda
Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, Italy | 2000 | 170 min
Vanda Duarte returns, after Ossos, in the images of Pedro Costa. The second episode of a trilogy set in the Fontainhas neighbourhood, in the outskirts of Lisbon, No quarto da Vanda follows the daily life of a young woman who is a drug addict and the local community, while the deafening surrounding noises from a building site are a sign of the ongoing demolitions of the old houses. The film’s double space – Vanda’s room, where she, drugged up, spends her days with her sister, and the narrow locales of the neighbourhood – determines its rhythm, its peculiar time, in which the doom of a vanishing community is as present as the resistance of the bodies, their slow pace. In the dark and intimacy of their rooms, those bodies emerge with a particular strength, a significance that lets them go beyond the roles they play according to the radical idea of cinema of the Portuguese film director.