NO QUARTO DA VANDA

The film is the extraordinary portrait of Vanda, a young drug user from Fontainhas, the Cape Verdian quarter of Lisbon. Pedro Costa shot the film with a very small DV camera, allowing him to meet his subject face-to-face, and its hard to say whether or not Vanda was even aware of the cameras presence. While initially intending to stay within the confinements of Vandas room, the filmmaker finally decided to include the rest of the quarter and to complete the study of «another way of living» with the inhabitants of Fontainhas. Thus, he creates a seemingly impossible equilibrium between what lies in front of and what lies behind the camera. As Emmanuel Burdeau observes in «Cahiers du cinéma»: «This place and its inhabitants dont expect anything from the cinema, they give themselves up to it in a worldless undemanding manner and with a generous insensitivity in which one understands that the filmmaker has found an inexhaustible subject-matter.»