VITALINA VARELA
Portugal, 2019
124 min.
- Synopsis
- Curatorial presentation
The silhouette of a woman appears on the doorstep of an airplane. She slowly starts to descend, leaving a trail of tears in her wake. On the runway, a group of migrant women await her, dressed in utility uniforms. “Go back, Vitalina – you will find nothing here,” they say, embracing her; the woman silently walks on.
In his seventh feature, Pedro Costa draws the portrait of the titular Vitalina Varela, a woman travelling from Cabo Verde to the margins of Lisbon to attend the funeral of her husband, whom she hasn’t seen in three decades. Her grief is complex and idiosyncratic, slowly unfurled by the director, observing her as she’s performing the rituals of death and processing her trauma, trying to make sense of entire decades of resentment, unrequited love, blind anger, and profound pain. A film made out of time-images, shot in Costa’s unmistakable chiaroscuro, that touches upon notions such as colonialism, loss, death, and their relationship to time and memory – a film of solitary monologues and reveries. A modern masterpiece. (Flavia Dima)
