In Vanda’s Room
(No Quarto da Vanda, Portugal, 2000)Directed by Pedro Costa
Introduced by Kass Banning (Cinema Studies Institute)
PLACE: Media Commons Theatre (Robarts Library, 3rd Floor)
DATE: November 27, 2014
TIME: 6:30 p.m.
With the intimate feel of a documentary and the texture of a Vermeer painting, Pedro Costa’s In Vanda’s Room takes an unflinching, fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalized people, centered around the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte. French philosopher Jacques Rancière identifies in the film a force that lies in the tensions between the settings of a miserable life and its inherent aesthetic possibilities: Pedro Costa “films are about a situation seemingly at the heart of the political issues of today: the fate of the exploited, of people who have come from afar, from former colonies in Africa, to work on Portuguese construction sites; people who have lost their families, their health, sometimes even their lives, on those sites, and who yesterday were dumped in suburban slums and subsequently moved to new homes—better lit, more modern, not necessarily more livable. There is no aestheticizing formalism or populist deference in the attention Pedro Costa pays to every beautiful form offered by the homes of the poor, and the patience with which he listens to the oftentimes trivial and repetitive words uttered in Vanda’s room […] The attention and the patience are inscribed, instead, in a different politics of art. This politics is a stranger to that politics which works by bringing to the screen the state of the world to make viewers aware of the structures of domination in place and inspire them to mobilize their energies. […] The politics here, rather, is about thinking the proximity between art and all those other forms which can convey the affirmation of a sharing [partage] or shareable [partageable] capacity.” Jacques Rancière
Language
All movies are in Portuguese with English subtitles. Each movie will be introduced and contextualized by Luso-Brazilian studies specialists, and a Q&A session will follow each screening.
Free Admission
Admission to this event is free, but please take the time to complete our event registration form:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1SQsj-bbJVo76aOU42BjYsQhVdNGnLVsnXShVd74rd7I/viewform
Organizers
Hudson Moura (Department of Spanish & Portuguese, University of Toronto)
Fabiano Rocha (University of Toronto Libraries)
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