Pedro Costa’s realism of the poor

Abstract

Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa has over the years pictured the lives of immigrants from Cabo Verde in Lisbon, in In Vanda’s Room (No Quarto de Vanda, 2000), Colossal Youth (Juventude em Marcha, 2006), Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro, 2014), and more recently Vitalina Varela (2019). His portrayal of impoverished Black communities in Fontainhas, a slum in the outskirts of the capital, uses the style of art cinema to portray how his protagonists are excluded from Portuguese society. His work features non‐professional actors, mixing documentary techniques with a highly aestheticized approach. This has led several critics (Pantenburg, 2010; Guarneri & Costa, 2015; Fajgenbaum, 2019) to describe Costa’s films as realist, emphasizing links between formal and material aspects of his work and how they relate to a manner of political engagement. In this article, I trace the discourse on realism in Costa up to the present day, leading to an assessment of how his most recent film, Vitalina Varela, relates to his past practice. The concept of “cosmopolitanism of the poor,” coined by Silviano Santiago ([2008] 2017), is introduced in order to read Costa’s films as engaging in a form of realism that appropriates high art to tell stories of migration and poverty in a postcolonial context.