Abstract

A unique opportunity to see Pedro Costa’s highly acclaimed “In Vanda’s Room” (2000) about Fontainhas, an impoverished quarter on the outskirts of Lisbon, and the lives of its mostly immigrant inhabitants.

With the intimate feel of a documentary and the texture of a Vermeer painting, “In Vanda’s Room” takes an unflinching, fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalised people. Organised around the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte, it presents the daily routines of Vanda and her neighbours with disarming matter-of-factness. Documenting the eventual demolition of Fontainhas, the film also shows how the redesign of urban space impacts on the local community. Rarely screened in the UK, this was Costa’s first use of digital video, and the evocative images he created remain some of the medium’s most astonishing. A trailer of the film is available at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMtsdwWSjyk.

27 September 2012, 4.30pm, Cambridge Arts Picturehouse Creole and Portuguese with English subtitles Followed by a Q&A with the director Pedro Costa

A joint event by the Cambridge Film Trust and the CRASSH conference “Filming Transnational Interiors”. For more information on the conference, please visit:

http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2057/