Pedro Costa, the Lisbon film-maker who stayed with Fontainhas

After shooting his second feature, Casa de Lava, in Cape Verde, Pedro Costa came home with more luggage than he had left with. People he had met in the islands gave him parcels and letters for relatives and friends who had emigrated to Portugal. The addresses led him to Fontainhas, a warren of self-built houses on the boundary between Lisbon and Amadora where many of those migrants lived.3 sources3 sources

He described the place years later as a big, dark shanty town laid out like an African or Arab medina, with secret ways in and out and even guards. Nobody walked in, he said, unless they wanted to buy or sell something, often drugs.1 source1 source

Costa kept going back. Over the next 25 years he made five features with the people he met there and in the estates where they were later moved. Fontainhas became known to film audiences around the world in the same years that the bulldozers erased it.4 sources4 sources

Those films were selected at Cannes, won prizes at Locarno and were shown in retrospectives and exhibitions from Berkeley to Tokyo. They also left a record of people most Portuguese rarely saw: the Cape Verdean labourers who worked on Lisbon's building sites, and the shacks they lived in while they did it.4 sources4 sources

Costa was born in Lisbon at the end of the 1950s, when Portugal was still ruled by the Estado Novo, the authoritarian regime built by António de Oliveira Salazar. He was a teenager when the army overthrew it on 25 April 1974, and remembered himself as “a kid yelling in the streets”, joining school and factory occupations and discovering music, politics, films and girls all at once.1 source1 source

He began a history degree at the University of Lisbon, played guitar and came through the city's punk scene, then left for the new film school of the National Conservatoire in the late 1970s (sources give 1977 or 1979). The teacher who mattered was António Reis, a poet whose own films with his wife, Margarida Cordeiro, such as Trás-os-Montes (1976), mixed documentary and fiction in remote villages of the north-east.3 sources3 sources

Reis taught from about a dozen films, from Eisenstein and Murnau to Ozu and Godard, with Bresson above all. He told his students to go and see Velázquez in the Prado, and to save up and travel alone.1 source1 source

Costa then worked as an assistant director to Jorge Silva Melo, Vítor Gonçalves and João Botelho, an experience he later called the worst of his life: big crews silencing a whole neighbourhood like a military police operation.2 sources2 sources

His first feature, O Sangue (1989), about two brothers left alone after their father's death, premiered at the Venice Film Festival. It was made the usual way, from a script, with Pedro Hestnes, Nuno Ferreira and Inês de Medeiros in the leads, and it marked Costa as a promising newcomer.2 sources2 sources

Cape Verde, an archipelago in the Atlantic, was a Portuguese colony until 5 July 1975. Cape Verdeans first came to Lisbon in numbers in the mid-1960s. Portugal was then losing many of its own workers to emigration to northern Europe, and young men to the colonial wars, so building firms, public works and shipyards recruited Cape Verdean labourers to fill the gap. Women followed from the late 1960s as domestic servants in middle-class Lisbon homes.2 sources2 sources

Independence brought a second, larger wave, and a third began in the mid-1980s, when Portugal joined the European Community and its structural funds paid for a construction boom. The men worked on those building sites; many women cleaned offices and homes. Most settled in the Lisbon metropolitan area, which held nearly 90 per cent of Cape Verdean residents.2 sources2 sources

Wages were low and housing was scarce, so many families built their own. Shanty towns and illegal self-built quarters spread behind Lisbon in the 1970s and 1980s, in Damaia and Buraca in Amadora, in Charneca and in parts of Loures, often with materials bought or borrowed from the sites where the men worked. Fontainhas, behind the Portas de Benfica on the Lisbon–Amadora boundary, was one of them: a slum without water or electricity, settled in the 1970s by migrants from Cape Verde, Angola and Guinea-Bissau and by poor Portuguese from the interior.5 sources5 sources

Casa de Lava (1994), the film that took Costa to the islands, follows a Lisbon nurse, played by Inês de Medeiros, who escorts a comatose Cape Verdean labourer home to the volcanic island of Fogo. It was inspired by Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and was shown in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes. As of 2018 it was still the only one of his films shot in the islands.3 sources3 sources

Ossos (Bones, 1997), the first of the Fontainhas films, was a normal production. Costa wrote a script about a suicidal teenage mother who cannot care for her baby, cast local people beside professionals, among them the sisters Vanda and Zita Duarte, and shot on 35mm in about six weeks with the veteran French cinematographer Emmanuel Machuel.2 sources2 sources

He was unhappy with the result, and so was Vanda. Film lights in tiny houses full of cracks lit up the whole neighbourhood at night; one construction worker came out at two in the morning to complain that he had to get up at four. The production solved every problem by paying for it, and the actors were paid, he said, in a “very chaotic, non-transparent way”.1 source1 source

The result was No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda's Room, 2000), a three-hour film shot mostly in Vanda Duarte's bedroom while she and her sister smoked heroin and talked about the neighbourhood as it was pulled down around them. Costa worked mostly alone. Thom Andersen counted 12 months of shooting; Thomas Austin says almost two years.3 sources3 sources

At first there was no money, and Costa did not pay her. Vanda sometimes bought the tapes herself. At the end, when German funding arrived to finish the film, he took a little from the post-production budget and paid her, her mother and the others, a sum he called merely symbolic. Costa calls the film a fiction, made of short sketches that were given a structure in the edit.1 source1 source

The machines heard in In Vanda's Room belonged to a national programme. On 7 May 1993 the government of Aníbal Cavaco Silva created the Programa Especial de Realojamento (PER), or Special Rehousing Programme, for the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto. Its stated aim was the final eradication of the barracas, the shacks, by rehousing their families in decent homes.2 sources2 sources

Councils that joined had to make an exhaustive survey of the shacks in their area. A state housing body, IGAPHE, gave them grants of up to half the cost of the land and the new flats, and the National Housing Institute could lend up to half more. Only families counted in that 1993 survey had a right to a new home, a rule that later left many households who arrived afterwards facing demolition with nowhere to go.2 sources2 sources

Amadora was the last council to sign up. By the end of 2005 it had cleared 12 of its 35 shanty neighbourhoods. Demolitions were by then reaching people who were not on the 1993 list, and residents of Fontainhas and Azinhaga dos Besouros in Amadora, with families from Cascais and Loures, had written an open letter to President Jorge Sampaio asking him to defend their right to housing.1 source1 source

Fontainhas came down in stages from the late 1990s, its land needed for the CRIL ring road. Between 2001 and 2004 most of its people were moved to new social housing in Amadora, at Casal da Boba, Zambujal and Casal da Mira. In Costa's words, the place where he had shot his films was gone: “Now it's a set of highways.”3 sources3 sources

Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth, 2006) moved between the two places. Its centre is Ventura, a Cape Verdean labourer who has lived in the old quarter for 34 years and whose wife has left him. He drifts between the ruins and his bare new flat at Casal da Boba, visiting Vanda, now rehoused too, and young people he treats as his children. The real Ventura was born on the island of Santiago in the 1950s and came to Portugal in the 1970s to work in construction. The film was selected for the main competition at Cannes.4 sources4 sources

Ventura became Costa's closest collaborator. The scenes in his shack were staged as he remembered his life 20 or 30 years earlier, even to the timing: two hours of cards, then straight to bed. Costa paid him the same as he paid himself, because he was on set every day whether or not he was in the shot. Andersen counted 15 months of shooting.2 sources2 sources

In one scene Ventura walks into the galleries of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, a building he had worked on as a labourer. He sits on an old red sofa, and stands among paintings by Rubens and other European masters until a guard whispers to him and he leaves. Costa said Ventura told him “I built this” and pointed out the scaffold he had fallen from. The point, Costa added, was that he had the right to be there.3 sources3 sources

Cavalo Dinheiro (Horse Money, 2014) sent Ventura back in memory to the revolutionary months of 1974 and 1975 and a knife fight with his friend Joaquim, with the old man now playing his younger self in hospital corridors and a lift. It won Costa the Best Director prize at Locarno.4 sources4 sources

While making Horse Money, Costa wanted to film people inside traditional houses like those of Fontainhas but could find few left. In 2013 a friend took him to Cova da Moura, another Amadora neighbourhood, to a house shut up since its owner died. The door opened and a woman dressed in black stood there, afraid they were the police or immigration. She was Vitalina Varela, the dead man's widow, who had come from Cape Verde after his death five or six months earlier.4 sources4 sources

She appears briefly in Horse Money. Vitalina Varela (2019) is her own film: the story of a woman who waited 25 years for a plane ticket to join her husband and lands in Lisbon three days after his burial. It draws on her life without reproducing it, and Costa credited her as a co-writer.3 sources3 sources

The method had become settled. In the mornings she told Costa about her life; in the afternoons they walked around a little. A crew of three, later four, shot from Monday to Saturday for at least a year, in her house, the nearby streets and a makeshift studio in an abandoned suburban cinema. Lighting a single shot could take a week or two, and a scene could run to 30 takes.3 sources3 sources

At Locarno in August 2019 the film won the Golden Leopard, the festival's top prize, and Vitalina Varela won Best Actress. Sight and Sound called it the standout of the festival by common consent, though the German critic Rüdiger Suchsland attacked it as a “mandarin” winner of art cinema's insiders' game.3 sources3 sources

Costa rarely uses a written screenplay. He takes notes, phrases and beginnings and endings from what his actors tell him, then rehearses on camera until a scene settles. He calls the actors his screenwriters and says the films depend on their health and their mood, since there are no conventional contracts, only trust.2 sources2 sources

He compares them to actors in ancient Greece, who did not pretend to be someone else but brought news of themselves and their city. Ventura and Vanda, he said, mixed their own stories with the social story of their country and their neighbourhood. Equal pay and a crew small enough to fit the alleys belong to the same idea; he once called it “a little bit of communism”.2 sources2 sources

Abroad, Costa became a festival and museum name. Jacques Rivette called him “genuinely great”; the Berkeley Art Museum gave him a retrospective in 2008, Serralves in Porto an exhibition in 2018, and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum another in 2025. In 2017 the Hollywood Academy invited him to join, and in 2020 the San Francisco film festival gave him its Persistence of Vision award.5 sources5 sources

The New Left Review noted in 2019 that outside cinephile circles he remained largely unknown. Their value for Portugal is partly as evidence. In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth are a record of a shanty town and its demolition that few Portuguese ever saw, made with its residents rather than about them.3 sources3 sources

In Lisbon the PER rehoused most of the families it counted, and the city no longer greets visitors with what one councillor called “a sea of favelas”. Costa's films show the other side: communities broken up between estates, families left off the 1993 list, and men like Ventura, who helped build its museums, still living at its edge. Cova da Moura, excluded from Amadora's 1993 rehousing talks with the government, became the setting of Vitalina Varela.3 sources3 sources