Vitalina’s (in)visibility: contemporary Portugal and the cinema of human mobility

ABSTRACT

Critically acclaimed in film festivals around the world, Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela was a strong contender in the 2019 race for the Best International Feature Film Academy Award. At the time, many suggested the film was not only an exquisite work of art, but also relevant for debates about immigration and racism. This is a fruitful analytical angle, which I propose to examine in relation to the critical reception of Pedro Costa’s work, the current socio-political context in Portugal, and the notion of cinema of human mobility. This article puts forward a close textual reading of the film’s style grounded in historical, political and social matters. I suggest that the film tells Vitalina’s story, but only briefly; shows her decadent living conditions, but only partially; and hears her lament, but only faintly, and I argue Vitalina Varela is a particularly rich case study to illustrate important debates about the relationship between politics and aesthetics in contemporary transnational cinema.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• racism
• human mobility
• Pedro Costa
• Portugal

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Notes

1. See, for instance, IndieWire: https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/50-best-movies-2020-critics-poll/promising-young-woman-main/; and the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/dec/01/the-50-best-films-of-2020 (accessed 25 October 2021).

2. All translations from texts originally published in Portuguese are mine.

3. Source: IMDb https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139500/awards/?ref_=tt_awd.

4. Transcripts of the lectures are available online at http://www.rouge.com.au/10/costa_seminar.html (accessed 14 October 2021).

5. Available at https://lumiere.obs.coe.int/web/search/index.php (accessed 22 October 2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mariana Liz

MarianaLiz is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Lisbon. She is the author of Euro-Visions (2016), editor of Women’s Cinema in Contemporary Portugal (with Hilary Owen, 2020) and Portugal’s Global Cinema (2018), among other publications.