Vitalina Varela

Director: Pedro Costa, Pedro Costa, Pedro Costa, Pedro Costa, Pedro Costa

2020 / 124min / DCP

Costa’s film is the sort of thing that demands to be seen on a big screen in order to really be seen, a movie that renders marginal lives in epic scope, and moves at the pace of aching bodies. A sort of follow-up to Costa’s Horse Money, centering the title character, a nonprofessional actress of the same name, playing a Cape Verdean woman who’s arrived to settle the affairs of the recently deceased husband she hasn’t seen in 40 years. One of the most gorgeously shot films of the digital era, and human in a way that has always been rare.