In Vanda's Room

2000 Portuguese film

8 August 2000 (2000-08-08)

(Locarno Film Festival)

Running time

171 min.CountryPortugalLanguagesPortuguese, Cape Verdean Creole

In Vanda's Room (Portuguese: No Quarto da Vanda, 2000) is a docufiction (a subgenre of cinéma vérité) film by Portuguese director Pedro Costa. This is the second film in his Fontainhas trilogy.

Overview

The film follows the daily life of Vanda Duarte, a heroin addict, in the Fontainhas district, a shanty outskirt of Lisbon. The film's focus is also on the community of the district and its townscape. No Quarto da Vanda follows the drama film Ossos (1997) in which Vanda Duarte plays as an actress.

The film took a year to shoot after the (initially) one-person crew settled in the location, where Vanda and the community including Cape Verdean immigrants lived depressed lives.

In spite of its three-hour length, the director Pedro Costa made the film in a realist style by using fixed shots entirely. Melancholic life of the community was shot on digital video in a low-key way. Costa said about his impression of the district in a conversation with Jean-Pierre Gorin^[1]

When I entered the Fontainhas area, there were colors and smells that made me remember the things and events of the past, and also ideas about people to which I am attracted. These ideas nestled close to each other, living together even as they led very solitary lives because of violent and painful separation. A form of interesting and incompatible relationships existed in this.^[2]

The film also sees the Fontainhas district slowly being demolished. The displaced inhabitants are featured in Costa's next film Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth, 2006).

The Criterion Collection described the film as "burrow[ing] even deeper into the Lisbon ghetto and the lives of its desperate inhabitants... with the intimate feel of a documentary and the texture of a Vermeer painting" and praised its "unflinching, fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalized people".^[1]

Cast

Source:^[1]

Vanda Duarte as Self
Lena Duarte as Self
Zita Duarte as Self
Pedro Lanban
António 'Pango' Semedo
Paulo Nunes
Paulo Jorge Gonçalves
Manuel Gomes Miranda
Evangelina Nelas
Fernando Paixão
Diogo Miranda

Credits

Source:^[1]

Director: Pedro Costa
Producer: Karl Baumgartner
Producer: Andres Pfäffli / Elda Guidinetti
Producer: Francisco Villa-Lobos
Cinematography: Pedro Costa
Editing: Dominique Auvray
Sound: Philippe Morel
Sound: Mathieu Imbert
Sound: Stephan Konken

Accolades

Source:^[3]

Despite its highly fictional nature, its elusive classification and its documentary-like hybridization allowed it to win the FIPRESCI Prize at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in 2001 "for presenting life in its near-original form".^[4]

Pedro Costa collected the France Culture Award (Foreign Cineaste of the Year) for directing the film at 2002 Cannes Film Festival.^[5]

Home video

This film, together with Ossos (1997) and Colossal Youth (2006), is released by the Criterion Collection in a box set Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa.^[6]

References

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d "In Vanda's Room". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved 2023-01-02.
^ "YIDFF: Publications: YIDFF 2001 Official Catalog". www.yidff.jp.
^ No Quarto da Vanda - IMDb, retrieved 2023-01-02
^ Fipresci. "2001 Awards". www.fipresci.org. Archived from the original on 2008-02-03.
^ "Cannes Film Festival (2002)". IMDb. Retrieved 2023-01-02.
^ "Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved 2023-01-02.

External links

In Vanda's Room at IMDb
In Vanda's Room at AllMovie
In Vanda's Room at the TCM Movie Database
Podcast with Pedro Costa (on the "Letters from Fontainhas" Criterion DVD set, 2010), GreenCine Daily
Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas Trilogy: Rooms for the Living and the Dead an essay by Cyril Neyrat at the Criterion Collection