Interview: Pedro Costa on Vitalina Varela

Vitalina Varela, the beautiful new film from Pedro Costa, is the cover of our January-February issue. Jordan Cronk spoke with Costa about the film’s story of a Cape Verdean woman named Vitalina who comes back to Lisbon for the funeral of her estranged husband. As Cronk put it in his feature: “Costa has been developing his approach into a new kind of dramatic portraiture . . . He has become a touchstone for an entire movement of contemporary art cinema ranging from documentary to the avant-garde.” Vitalina Varela next screens in the Sundance film festival, followed by an exclusive theatrical run at Film at Lincoln Center, where it showed in the main slate of the New York Film Festival. Last fall, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold spoke with Pedro Costa at Film at Lincoln Center about crafting his deeply moving and technically virtuosic film.