INTERVIEWS
A House of Cinema Made with Bricks: Director Pedro Costa discusses Vitalina Varela BY PAUL RISKER | Independent Film Scholar
Fig. 1 | Pedro Costa at the BFI London Film Festival 2019 (Jonathan Wong, Getty Images).
Vitalina Varela (2019) tells the story of the titular character Vitalina (played by co-author Vitalina Varela), whose husband leaves her in Cape Verde to find work in Portugal. He promised to send her money or bring her over to Lisbon, but he never does. Forty years later, she finally makes the journey to Lisbon, arriving three days after his funeral. Alone and isolated in his home, Vitalina confronts the ghosts of the past, learning about the life her husband lived in Portugal, while the world around her goes on living. She also meets Ventura, a priest from Cape Verde who performed her husband’s funeral and carries guilt from a tragic past incident. The characters share the names of the actors, creating a space for a collaboration between real life and fiction. Costa merges documentary and fiction with an ambiguity
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that pushes cinema towards a transcendental place, that the commercial construct of art as business has impeded. Director Pedro Costa’s previous films include Blood (1989), Casa de Lava (1994), Colossal Youth (2006), and Horse Money (2014). His cinema has become a voice, a means of expression for those figures living in Lisbon’s impoverished areas of the city, which he continues here in Vitalina Varela. Costa does not position himself as an outsider, but rather seeks a collaboration with these marginalised figures to go in search of a deeper understanding of who they are. At the BFI London Film Festival in October 2019, Costa spoke with MSJ about what motivates him as a filmmaker, being unafraid of depicting loneliness and distress, and his fears of the audience’s inflated desire for more image and sound.
