No quarto da Vanda

LIBRARIES AWARD

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 vagrancy. (…) 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 subject 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. The substance of the film has been incarnated and magnified by the filmmaker’s meticulous choice of situations, as well as the framing, lighting and length of the shots’the icon-like figure of a city slum.’ (Jacques Mandelbaum)