Vitalina Varela

Vitalina Varela appeared briefly in Horse Money, telling her own story. Pedro Costa then built an entire film around her, and it won the Golden Leopard at Locarno in 2019 along with the acting prize for her. She is not an actress; the events are broadly hers.

She lands at Lisbon barefoot, having flown from Cape Verde, and is met on the tarmac by cleaners who tell her there is nothing for her in Portugal and she should go home. Her husband, who emigrated decades earlier and kept promising to send for her, has been buried three days. She goes to the shack he lived in on the edge of the city and begins, methodically, to take possession of it — patching the roof, sorting papers, confronting a broken priest played by Ventura about what her husband's life here actually was.

Costa and his cinematographer Leonardo Simões shot it almost entirely at night in a darkness so deep that the film seems lit by a single candle at a time, and Varela's face, held in that light, carries most of it. Sight & Sound named it among the best films of its year. It is the most accessible entry point into Costa's Fontainhas cycle and the strongest — a study of grief, dignity and a debt owed by a country to the people who built it.