Retrospective Pedro Costa
Introducing
From 17 November to 5 December 2021, Cinema Galeries presents a retrospective of the work of director Pedro Costa, on the occasion of the release of his latest film, Vitalina Varela.
Introducing
From 17 November to 5 December 2021, Cinema Galeries presents a retrospective of the work of director Pedro Costa, on the occasion of the release of his latest film, Vitalina Varela.
Information
On Monday, August 12th, Cinema Galeries will be exceptionally closed due to maintenance works.
Thank you for your understanding.
True to its vocation of promoting new artistic and cinematographic forms, CINEMA GALERIES wishes to offer, on the occasion of the release of its latest movie “Vitalina Varela“, winner of the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival 2019, a focus on the work of the director and artist Pedro Costa from 17 November to 5 December 2021.
The work of Pedro Costa is focused on the excluded and the invisible. The majority of his films depict, in a form that mixes fiction and documentary, the daily life of marginalized people and immigrants in Lisbon’s working-class neighbourhoods. The characters on screen play themselves, providing their own words and working as an ad hoc film crew with Costa. The shooting conditions also make it a political cinema, Pedro Costa shoots almost exclusively in real locations and because of his ethics, he shoots on a very low budget. For example, when he directed In Vanda’s Room, he went alone to Fontaínhas every day with his own digital camera.
His work is characteristic of a melancholic meditation on love and loneliness turned towards Cape Verde, particularly in his film Casa de Lava, and of an immersion in the Cape Verdean immigrant population in Lisbon in the Fontaínhas trilogy, with Ossos (nominated for the Golden Lion Award at the Venice International Film Festival in 1997), In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth, exploring the impact of the Carnation Revolution and its consequences for Lisbon’s working class neighbourhoods, a revolution he will revisit with Horse Money in 2014.
In 2019, five years after receiving the Leopard of Direction at the Locarno Film Festival for Horse Money, Pedro Costa collaborates again with Vitalina Varela on the film of the same name. In this film, the director continues his experimentation with docu-drama, creating a sad story about the life of his actress, taking up a theme left unresolved among the shadows of Lisbon’s poor suburbs, to which Pedro Costa keeps returning. Vitalina Varela was awarded the Golden Leopard, as well as the Leopard for Best Actress.
