Vitalina Varela

Director: Pedro Costa

2019 / 124min / DCP

A film that demands to be seen on a big screen in order to truly be seen, Costa’s film, a model of chiaroscuro cinematography and spare nocturnal imagery, renders marginal lives in epic scope, and proceeds at a somnambulant pace that is nearly hypnotic in effect. A sort of follow-up to the director’s Horse Money centered on the title character, a nonprofessional actress of the same name, who portrays a Cape Verdean woman arrived in Lisbon to settle the affairs of the recently deceased husband she hasn’t seen in 40 years. “At once Costa’s saddest and most spiritual film… Shot with customary rigor and an increasingly refined and unparalleled sense of space, light, and shadow, the film invests a tragic episode in its heroine’s life with an intimacy and grace that forges new dimensions in Costa’s cinema.” —Film Comment

Distributor: Grasshopper Film

Part of The Year Begins in Silence