Vitalina Varela
57th New York Film Festival
September 27 - October 13, 2019
Pedro Costa’s latest, a film of deeply concentrated beauty, stars nonprofessional actor Vitalina Varela in a truly remarkable performance, reprising and expanding upon her haunted supporting role from Costa’s Horse Money. She plays a Cape Verdean woman who has come to Fontainhas for her husband’s funeral after being separated from him for decades.
Vitalina Varela is now playing in our Virtual Cinema. Must end this Thursday, May 14!
We are pleased to offer our Film at Lincoln Center audience the chance to see Pedro Costa’s masterful, evocative new film Vitalina Varela at home, in partnership with Grasshopper Film. Your screening rental will support FLC, and help us in our mission to remain a vibrant center for cinema culture once this turbulent period is behind us.
Price: $12 (50% of proceeds support Film at Lincoln Center)
Rental Period: 3 Days
Technical Support: Every film released in our Virtual Cinema is available through the individual distributor’s websites and streaming services. The link to rent and view the film will take you to their website, but a portion of your virtual rental will help support FLC. If you are having technical issues, please read this FAQ or contact through this form.
Portuguese director Pedro Costa has continually returned in his films to the Fontainhas neighborhood, a shantytown on the outskirts of Lisbon that’s home to largely immigrant communities. Not merely a chronicler of the poor and dispossessed, Costa renders onscreen characters that exist somewhere between real and fictional, the living and the dead. His latest, a film of deeply concentrated beauty, stars nonprofessional actor Vitalina Varela in a truly remarkable performance. Reprising and expanding upon her haunted supporting role from Costa’s Horse Money (NYFF52), she plays a Cape Verdean woman who has come to Fontainhas for her husband’s funeral after being separated from him for decades due to economic circumstance, and despite her alienation begins to establish a new life there. The grief of the present and the ghosts of the past commingle in Costa’s ravishing chiaroscuro compositions, a film of shadow and whisper that might be the director’s most visually extraordinary work. A Grasshopper Film release. An NYFF57 selection.
Watch Costa’s NYFF57 Q&A below and read an in-depth interview with the director in Film Comment‘s January-February 2020 issue or online here.
A ravishing masterpiece.
—Eric Kohn, Indiewire
A plaintive and piercingly beautiful vision.
—Christopher Small, Sight & Sound
A spellbinding nightmare. Dazzling.
—Neil Young, The Hollywood Reporter
It’s essential cinema.
—Glenn Kenny, The New York Times
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