In Vanda's Room

Pedro Costa had made two conventional features when he went into Fontainhas, a Cape Verdean quarter on the edge of Lisbon, to shoot Ossos with a full crew. He came back alone with a small digital camera and spent close to two years there. In Vanda's Room is the result, and it changed what a certain kind of European film-maker thought was possible.

Vanda Duarte, who had acted in Ossos, is filmed in her own room, in real time, over months. She smokes heroin, coughs enormously, argues with her sister Zita, sells vegetables, talks about her mother. Neighbours come and go. The quarter is being demolished around them, and the sound of walls coming down is constant. Costa shot everything on a Panasonic DV camera in available light, in fixed frames held for very long durations, and edited a hundred and eighty hours down to three.

It has no narration, no interviews and no argument stated aloud, and it is not exactly a documentary — Costa worked with his subjects to stage scenes they had described to him. What it establishes is a method he has used ever since: extreme patience, a place nobody else was filming, and a refusal to treat poverty as spectacle. The Criterion box that collected it as part of the Fontainhas cycle brought it to an audience that had only read about it for twenty years.