Portugal’s submission to the 2021 Academy Awards – Best International Feature Film
Sponsored by Andrea Rogers
Vitalina Varela, a 55-year-old woman from Cape Verde, arrives in Lisbon three days after her husband’s funeral. She’s been waiting for her plane ticket for more than 25 years.
A film of deeply concentrated beauty, Vitalina Varela stars nonprofessional actor Vitalina Varela in an extraordinary performance based on her own life. Vitalina plays a Cape Verdean woman who has traveled to Lisbon to reunite with her husband, after two decades of separation, only to arrive mere days after his funeral. Alone in a strange forbidding land, she perseveres and begins to establish a new life. Varela belongs in the lineage of the epic western narratives of John Ford, in which a lonely figure returns to a hollowed-out homestead and is confronted by living reminders of their previous failed attempts at forming a life of stability and peace.
Winner of the Golden Leopard for Best Film and Best Actress at the Locarno Film Festival, as well as an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival, Vitalina Varela is a film of shadow and whisper, a profoundly moving and visually ravishing masterpiece. * NY Times Critics Pick: Essential cinema.*
“The Portuguese director conjures dark, dreamlike visions of post-colonial neglect and yearning that hover somewhere between fantasy and neorealism, horror and melodrama, spirituality and desperation. Vitalina Varela, Costa’s fifth journey into the shantytown Fontainhas outside of Lisbon, once again showcases Costa’s masterful ability to mine cinematic poetry from a unique environment and the mournful figures who wander through its murky depths.” ~ Indiewire