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VITALINA VARELA
Portugal | 2019 | 124 min
Already seen in Cavalo dinheiro, Vitalina Varela takes Pedro Costa back to the dark alleys and houses of Fontainhas, a neighbourhood in the Lisbon outskirts. The woman comes to Lisbon short after her husband Joaquim’s death for a long-awaited journey, but what she finds on her arrival is emptiness, absence. Hers is a story that, as often happens in the cinema of the Portuguese film director, conjures a trauma, a wound, that remains offscreen. Only images (beginning with those of the woman’s face) and words can evoke it. The film’s present is determined by the past, the black that envelopes bodies and places. Vitalina’s deep wound reverberates in the spaces of the neighbourhood, that seem to be haunted by the inhabitants – Lisbon’s Cape Verdean community – as if they were living dead sentenced to a motionless limbo with no way out. But it is cinema itself that proposes a movement: it is the transfiguring power of the cinema of Pedro Costa that postulates itself as a possibility of redemption. (d.d.)