There is a constant dialogue between form, style, and content that flows and grows throughout all Costa’s filmography. If with No Quarto da Vanda Costa had got rid of the narrative structure still vaguely present in Ossos, in Juventude em Marcha, third of what’s been called the Letters from Fontaínhas trilogy, he elevates the documentary nature to the lyrical stylisation that will keep on being explored through Cavalo Dinheiro and Vitalina Varela.
The estrangement of Pedro Costa’s characters in the architectural brutalism of the new district they have been relocated to, provides the intense emotional base on which Juventude em Marcha is built. I have seen Vanda as a teenager, then as a gaunt young woman addicted to heroin, now a mature lady with little to do except for . . . waiting, essentially. She is a survivor. And yet, seeing her, or Ventura, in what as a matter of fact is a better, healthier environment, doesn’t feel as reassuring as it should. I rather see a bunch of people removed from their roots, however rotten the ground they were in. And I see them lost, their future filled with a somehow emptier vacuum.
Striking are the shots where a seemingly aimless Ventura wanders through a maze of bright imposing blocks under a pitch black sky despite the blinding sun, or the the family portrait of a motherly Vanda and her daughter in a room that seems not theirs, and to some extent isn’t. ‘Mama just wants to raise you, then I can die . . . mama is sick . . . mama doesn’t think she can raise you,’ says Vanda to her little girl sitting on a bed that no matter how clean and neat, still looks like the same old dead end.

As I stagger on the bus on my way home dripping tears of an unexpected shower, I realise that part of me missed the presence of a unique character such as that brilliantly played by Tom Burke in The Souvenir—the enigmatic Anthony. In retrospect, he (and his perfect costumes, I should add—the pinstripe suit with pink lining, the military-style long coat, the striped pyjamas) is one of the main reasons I fell so madly in love with it. But the rest of me was also enchanted by the overwhelming if metaphysical persistence of Anthony’s charisma, by the disquietingly accurate portraiture of film students and tutors (man, I found myself thinking, we really are all alike—the same conversations, frustrations, desires, insecurities, and the ‘I always wanted to be like Orson Welles’), and even more by how Joanna Hogg tells of the indissoluble tangle of cinematic and personal urges that life for an artist is—especially in the making, when a voice, this bloody irritating word, is fighting to exist and be heard.

Never a line was drawn more squiggly between life and fiction than the imaginary one that connects all Pedro Costa’s films—life being that of his model characters, the people his oeuvre is the visual log of a continuous collaboration and a mutual growth, whether human or creative. That very line, thin or thick or blurred, is the mark that defines Costa’s cinema as it finds its shape between the narrative and the documentary, to eventually land on the more stylised approach of his recent works.If on its ragged surface Ossos deals with inner demons and outer hardships, underneath it seems to dig into the different depths of the theme of memory. ‘Give her a kiss, she remembers you,’ we hear say at some point out of the blue. And as that line stays suspended in thin air, almost trapped in a cage of bricks, more connections arise. It is ultimately the prospect of memory what looms over the desperate denial of two tormented parents. But it is also memory what the film itself is capturing of a district soon to be destroyed. And it’s again memory what an inescapable fate has already made of its inhabitants—one more to be rejected by the relentless noise produced by our society.

How uneasy it is to observe Vanda’s life through a lens that more than ever takes the shape of a peephole. And what a strange feeling going back to mine after having somehow experienced hers.
Clearing my throat to say nothing. Feeling cold because it’s late, or warm after putting on a jumper. Drinking water. Anything I do echos what I have just seen on screen and goes further, deep into my own memories—those little gestures, the routine, unbearable and comforting at once.
Costa’s dantesque semidocumentary portrait can’t but have a different impact on anyone who suffered from some form of addiction. In the core, they are all the same. And they all make feel as some old constructions are being demolished, havoc eating and closing in. But the annihilation Costa tells of has a broader meaning—social, cultural, equally physical, and global. Through dust and cracks and doors ajar, No Quarto da Vanda lets a pale light in, on the deprived population of shantytowns. It takes us to the forbidden rooms of the unwanted who get removed like dirt from the floor or, thinking of a striking image from the film, like dried wax from a table. Well, they exist.
Vanda’s misery made me cringe—for her, for me. Perhaps I felt a sense a guilt, or relief. I am alive and sound, but what about her, them. It is what we want, says Vanda to a friend, to do drugs. But it’s what we are bound to want, says he raising the ominous side of determinism that always scared me. And yet there’s some sort of distorted poetry in it, and in Costa’s stunningly brutal work. Intimidating and brilliant, addictive in itself.

We open on a dark alleyway. To the right, elevated from the street level, a cemetery. The crosses loom above us. Vitalina Varela is an immersive journey into the depths of loss, its silent misery. Despite having the same elliptical narrative of Cavalo Dinheiro, its clearer storyline makes the characters immediately relatable and the experience more poignant. But this is not in the slightest accidental, or a flaw of the former for that matter. Through a process of passionate human discovery rather than one of cinematic manipulation, Costa seems to shape his films to the inner truth of their characters. Whereas Cavalo Dinheiro is based on a fictionalised version of the real Ventura, who according to Costa is incapable of recounting his life, Vitalina Varela reflects the lucidity of her eponymous protagonist’s tragic recollections.
Pedro Costa tells the struggles of an incredible life through little moments of such intensity to be possibly regarded as expressionistic. Vitalina arrives to Portugal from her native Cabo Verde barefoot. Her silhouette dangerously stands on the edge of the open door while the stairs are yet to attach. Nobody is there to assist, no other passengers. Tears, or blood, run down her ankles. Hers is the confidence of who defeated by fate challenges it to dare further. ‘Nothing left for you here, Vitalina.’ Wherever you go, grief will follow. Vitalina.
Once in the flat that was supposed to become theirs, her late husband’s bright yellow hi-vis breaks the bronze dimness of a never-ending night like a ghost, and a recurring visual aggression to the warm tints of the film.
To a similar cringing effect and a subdued witty sense of irony, contrast is sought through the secondary characters. A man flushing the loo in the background while candles are fixed by an impromptu home altar, or a priest loudly blowing his nose after confessing the one soul still coming to the church. ‘Seven cans of tuna, five euros? (beat) Excuse me, my condolences,’ says a mourner to an appalled Vitalina. Stoic, firm as a statue of herself.
Costa’s gorgeous ode to another dispossessed divinity is a dark place in ruins where faith is lost but another is to be found. For the art of cinema, and cinema as a true form of art.

Pedro Costa abstracts grief and hardship into stylised images of electrifying beauty—sensuous and gritty at once. Cavalo Dinheiro’s dramatic lighting is almost reminiscent of a late caravaggesque chiaroscuro. Its staging is designed with still photo sensitivity. Figures emerge like statues from the darkness, they are surrounded by it—perhaps they should be called models, à la Bresson. Statues belong to the night, and the deranged creatures who live in it, says Costa in an interview. Cavalo Dinheiro is not about spirits and dreams but rather the coexistence of present and past—the physical being of the latter, the torturous attempt at feeling it in order to leave it behind. Films themselves are made to forget, according to Costa. Dialogues are few, their economy makes them even sharper. The contrast between sensuous and raw is always there, taking at times a moving shape, others ironic. ‘Showing off your ruffle shirt, embroidered slacks, high-heeled boots . . . razor in your back pocket,’ whispers Vitalina to Ventura in a vaguely hallucinative scene—and it’s almost an artistic statement.

Ixcanul is a film of subdued collisions, some literal, some shaped as near metaphorical matches. A boar drinking rum to get horny, a woman mothering piglets. Magic fables and dreams clashing with breaches of striking realism, our vulnerable humanity with the harshness of nature. But also, on a note that will prove to be familiar to Bustamante’s oeuvre, the natives’ culture, and language, versus that of the conquistadores.
Looming over the hustling of its characters, are the themes of exploitation and the difficult dialogue history brought to the contemporary Guatemalan society.
Ironically echoing a scene of La Llorona, Ixcanul ends with a closeup on a beautiful Kaqchikel woman—only this time a veil is dropped on her face. It is tempting to lose ourselves in the depth of her firm stare before it’s shut and feel the rumbling of the volcano, or the bite of its creatures.

Temblores moves from the unbelievable to the unbearable, and digs further. It isn’t so much the denounce of an endemic cultural blindness, as the microanalysis of the individual reactions that make it so abrasively convincing. Hinting at broader problems such as that of identity and free will, Bustamante guides us through the absurd, the touching—excruciatingly so, when two children steal a perfume to feel their dad closer and fall asleep tenderly hugging each other—and the near-comedy, as a priest echoes with words of wisdom an already preposterous situation or a religious fanatic lady in a perfect sheath dress gives a Full-Metal-Jacket-like lesson in masculinity to a group of naked men in a shower.
From the very first ambiguous scene to the genius finale, our heart is shaken, our eyes wide open.

However inspired by a rather eerie Latin American folktale, I find calling it a horror film not just misleading but quite reductive. As many traditional legends passed on over the centuries by word of mouth, La Llorona does tell of spirits and monsters, but they are more real and contemporary than we might like to think. Bluntly denouncing, if through fictional characters, blood-curdling historical events while unfolding an intense family drama, its absorbing narrative flow lets the unease crawl under our skin. Now magical, now raw and tense, it gives us the time to reflect, no matter where we are from, on our own culture and the common aberrations of our kind—the one we call human.
La Llorona’s aesthetics and internal imagery are as impactful as the message it delivers. Cold tints prevail while the warm fill the tight visual space metaphorically given to the natives. Water and its creatures are used as signs of an unforgiving past resurfacing. Curtains and veils shape the mystery, the untold, the unspeakable. Particularly masterful is a scene where a Mayan woman candidly recounts her shocking experience at a trial. The camera slowly tracks back, almost defied as the atrocious details are being revealed. Only at the end, she uncovers her face from a beautifully embroidered veil. The truth is out, it won’t hide back any longer. Artfully, this shot mirrors the opening, where a lady that we’ll shortly know be the wife of the retired general accused of genocide, asks God for protection reciting a long, excruciating prayer. Her stare is blank, or aghast. We will know in a couple of hours, when ours will likely be the same.