Director / photography: Pedro Casta
Editors: Dominique Auvray, Patricia Saramago
Cast: Vanda Duarte, Lena Duarte, Zita Duarte, Manuel Gomes Miranda, Diogo Pires Miranda, Evangeline Nelas, Miquelina Barros, Antonio Semedo Moreno, Paulo Nunes, Paulo Jorge Goncalves, Pedro Lanban
Vanda Duarte—a real person played by herself (everyone here plays themselves)—is a heroin addict who spends most of her time in her room smoking and coughing. Others inject the drug (and/or cocaine) but we don’t see much of that with Vanda. She runs a lighter under a piece of foil with the powder on it, sucking up the smoke through a glass tube. We see a lot of that. She also spends much of the movie intermittently rolling up a skein of yarn into a ball. Like many scenes in this movie it is relaxing and boring by seemingly random turns. The most unlikely scenes—such as ongoing demolition captured by director and cinematographer Pedro Costa wandering the slum streets filming what crosses his field of vision—reduce us to a kind of mesmerized, numb staring.
Vanda’s room is in Fontainhas, a slum district of Lisbon, Portugal. And, technically, it’s probably not her room. She and most of these people are squatting in buildings designated for demolition, in blocks and neighborhoods designated for urban revitalization projects. There didn’t seem to be as many scenes of demolition as there seemed to be the first time I looked at this. The movie casts a certain hypnotic pall as it wanders its desolations. The scenes of demolition can be whining, banging, and loud, as construction usually is, but they can also take on ASMR qualities somehow. They’re often long and there is something inherently soothing about watching a machine methodically carry out its appointed destruction. Other times the racket is unbearable and annoying, like the movie at large.
Vanda Duarte—a real person played by herself (everyone here plays themselves)—is a heroin addict who spends most of her time in her room smoking and coughing. Others inject the drug (and/or cocaine) but we don’t see much of that with Vanda. She runs a lighter under a piece of foil with the powder on it, sucking up the smoke through a glass tube. We see a lot of that. She also spends much of the movie intermittently rolling up a skein of yarn into a ball. Like many scenes in this movie it is relaxing and boring by seemingly random turns. The most unlikely scenes—such as ongoing demolition captured by director and cinematographer Pedro Costa wandering the slum streets filming what crosses his field of vision—reduce us to a kind of mesmerized, numb staring.
Vanda’s room is in Fontainhas, a slum district of Lisbon, Portugal. And, technically, it’s probably not her room. She and most of these people are squatting in buildings designated for demolition, in blocks and neighborhoods designated for urban revitalization projects. There didn’t seem to be as many scenes of demolition as there seemed to be the first time I looked at this. The movie casts a certain hypnotic pall as it wanders its desolations. The scenes of demolition can be whining, banging, and loud, as construction usually is, but they can also take on ASMR qualities somehow. They’re often long and there is something inherently soothing about watching a machine methodically carry out its appointed destruction. Other times the racket is unbearable and annoying, like the movie at large.