Dans la chambre de Vanda
( No quarto da Vanda )

Pedro Costa
2000 - 170 min - 35 mm - Couleur - Portugal, Allemagne, Italie, Suisse

"In "Ossos" (1997), Pedro Costa filmed the social outcasts of the Fontainhas district on the outskirts of Lisbon. Expelled from the human community, the characters float in the endless hiatus induced by drugs, hunger and poverty.
In the present film, narrative, the outside world and even the film crew have all disappeared. What remains is a face-to-face experience between Vanda Duarte, the physically wasted young woman of "Ossos", Pedro Costa, who films her with a small digital camera and, off camera, the deafening noise of mechanical shovels, which advance like death to wipe the district and its inhabitants off the face of the earth.
Apart from a few rare visitors, conversations with her sister and quarrels with her mother, the film's subjects matter centres on Vanda's emaciated, almost absent body-which is nonetheless constantly present in an obsessive ritual devoted to the deadly grip of narcotics."
(Jacques Mandelbaum)