In Vanda's Room

In Vanda's Room (Portuguese: No Quarto da Vanda, 2000) is a docufiction (a subgenre of cinéma vérité) film by Portuguese director Pedro Costa. This is the second film in his Fontainhas trilogy.

Overview
The film follows the daily life of Vanda Duarte, a heroin addict, in the Fontainhas district, a shanty outskirt of Lisbon. The film's focus is also on the community of the district and its townscape. No Quarto da Vanda follows the drama film Ossos (1997) in which Vanda Duarte plays as an actress.

The film took a year to shoot after the (initially) one-person crew settled in the location, where Vanda and the community including Cape Verdean immigrants lived depressed lives.

In spite of its three-hour length, the director Pedro Costa made the film in a realist style by using fixed shots entirely. Melancholic life of the community was shot on digital video in a low-key way. Costa said about his impression of the district in a conversation with Jean-Pierre Gorin

"When I entered the Fontainhas area, there were colors and smells that made me remember the things and events of the past, and also ideas about people to which I am attracted. These ideas nestled close to each other, living together even as they led very solitary lives because of violent and painful separation. A form of interesting and incompatible relationships existed in this."

The film also sees the Fontainhas district slowly being demolished. The displaced inhabitants are featured in Costa's next film Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth, 2006).

The Criterion Collection described the film as "burrow[ing] even deeper into the Lisbon ghetto and the lives of its desperate inhabitants... with the intimate feel of a documentary and the texture of a Vermeer painting" and praised its "unflinching, fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalized people".

Cast
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 * Vanda Duarte as Self
 * Lena Duarte as Self
 * Zita Duarte as Self
 * Pedro Lanban
 * António 'Pango' Semedo
 * Paulo Nunes
 * Paulo Jorge Gonçalves
 * Manuel Gomes Miranda
 * Evangelina Nelas
 * Fernando Paixão
 * Diogo Miranda

Credits
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 * Director: Pedro Costa
 * Producer: Karl Baumgartner
 * Producer: Andres Pfäffli / Elda Guidinetti
 * Producer: Francisco Villa-Lobos
 * Cinematography: Pedro Costa
 * Editing: Dominique Auvray
 * Sound: Philippe Morel
 * Sound: Mathieu Imbert
 * Sound: Stephan Konken

Accolades
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Despite its highly fictional nature, its elusive classification and its documentary-like hybridization allowed it to win the FIPRESCI Prize at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in 2001 "for presenting life in its near-original form".

Pedro Costa collected the France Culture Award (Foreign Cineaste of the Year) for directing the film at 2002 Cannes Film Festival.

Home video
This film, together with Ossos (1997) and Colossal Youth (2006), is released by the Criterion Collection in a box set Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa.