IN VANDA’S ROOM

n Vanda’s Room marks Costa’s commitment to presenting a brutal, unblushing reality in all its corporeality, rendering it visible in its truest form and in its darkest splendour. A world of intimacy, of the fragility of two sisters (Vanda and Zita Duarte) relegated to a small room, a world of drugs and desperation, a community of workers, vendors, dealers, housewives, the unemployed and vagrants, all in a disappearing neighbourhood. And yet a world where beauty can still be found: in smiles, coughs, cries, gestures of offering flowers or medicine, in children’s games, in the eyes of the elderly, in everyone’s struggle to stay alive. A world in which the total eclipse from 1999 is regarded with indifference – the real eclipse happens every day. Costa’s cinema is one that gives dignity back to these communities, a right not to lose their memory and identity. Each gesture or word of the people is there to reflect their whole existence: past, present and the hope of a future. As Costa will remind us later, these people are the same as those from the photographs of Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives), Walker Evans (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) or Robert Frank. (Cristi Luca)