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.
Local Time
- Timezone: America/New_York
- Date: 08 Nov 2023
- Time: 9:00
Location
- Spazio Alfieri - Via dell'Ulivo, 8, 50122 Florence
Organizer
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Pedro Costa
Pedro Costa is one of the most important directors in contemporary Portuguese cinema. Born in 1959, he studied history and art history at the University of Lisbon before starting to work as an assistant director for some of the most prominent Portuguese directors, including João César Monteiro and André Téchiné. His career as a director began in 1989 with the film O Sangue, presented at the Cannes Film Festival in the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs section. Since then, he has directed numerous films that have been screened at major international festivals such as the Venice Film Festival and the Cannes Film Festival. His film In Vanda's Room (2000) won the FIPRESCI prize at the Cannes Film Festival and was selected to represent Portugal at the Oscars in the Best Foreign Language Film category. With his subsequent films Colossal Youth (2006), Horse Money (2014), and Vitalina Varela (2019), Costa continued to work with the same non-professional actors who live in a poor neighborhood of Fontainhas in Lisbon. His work has received numerous awards worldwide, including the Best Film award for Vitalina Varela and the Best Director award for Horse Money at the Locarno Film Festival. Costa is known for his unique aesthetic, which often relies on long static shots and a creative use of light and shadow, for his attention to detail and composition.
