MORNING LIST
Cinephiles are called upon this week to survey the outskirts of Lisbon with Vitalina Varela, Golden Leopard in Locarno, to be transported to a refugee camp besieged by the Syrian army in the suburbs of Damascus (Little Palestine), to immerse yourself in the daily life of ferry maintenance workers (Ouistreham) or to invite yourself into the inter-self of Jane Birkin and Charlotte Gainsbourg (Jane by Charlotte).
“Vitalina Varela”: night and splendor
The night belongs to Pedro Costa. Always. Since The blood, his first feature film, produced in 1989, a tale of three wandering children possessed by the dark fever of sacrifice and secrecy. Always installed on the side of the voiceless, the recluse, the Portuguese filmmaker has been camping, more precisely since Ossos (1998), in the insanitary Cape Verdean islets of the gates of Lisbon, so many ossuaries, crypts, sepulchres, worried by the living dead who remain there.
Latest gem, awarded the Golden Leopard at Locarno in 2019, here is Vitalina Varela, whose name sounds like that of a superheroine. Cape Verdean in her fifties, she waited twenty-five years for her plane ticket to Lisbon to join her husband, Joaquim, who left to earn a living as a mason. She landed there, by a dark irony, a few days after the latter’s funeral, in June 2013. Here is what, with the help of Vitalina – who has since remained in the Cova da Moura district and played a role in reconstruction – Pedro Costa evokes in broad strokes in this film.
The ruinous waste of a separate life, the promises never kept, the betrayal, the abandonment, the death for all account. Suffice to say that there is a terrible fatality here but also bursts of tenderness, even a few good-natured gags, and the colorful and overwhelming flashback of a hypothetical happiness in Cape Verde. Shamanic cinema, past the side of the dead, scout of spirits. Jacques Mandelbaum
“Vitalina Varela”, Portuguese film by Pedro Costa. With Vitalina Varela, Ventura, Manuel Tavares Almeida (2 h 04).
“Little Palestine”: poetry and the disaster of a state of siege
There are documentary gestures more imperious than others and which, at times, have hung by a thread: inhabitant of Yarmouk, in the suburbs of Damascus (Syria), then the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the world, Abdallah Al -Khatib is given a camera by a friend who tries to escape – he will be tortured to death by the regime of Bashar Al-Assad.
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