kata-rokar You could plainfully say this is a movie about drugs and people taking drugs but then you'd have to take a closer look and another and yet another. In Vanda's Room is not about consumption of the body, it's about what roots us here on this earth. But is it real life? You have to wander about the nature and relationship of the director with all those characters. Are they even real? They don't seem like real people, sometimes it seems they're acting, sometimes it's real life. Is this a documentary or is this fiction? What's the nature of life? You'll find out you get a lot more questions than answers at the end of this fabulous piece of art. This is the story of an perfectly organized world suffering a true invasion - my machines who come to tear the Fontaínhas neighbourhood down, by men who think this is a junkies place. It's a world of rules as they come, it's a world of emotional need like everyone else's. It's just those people take drugs but drugs are a way of searching for care and comfort. This is a place of people and lives of people who want a place to call their own, despite whats inside. Amidst drug consumption and beyond consumption there are people who mourn the loss of their homes, who gets sad for feeling unrooted. While Fontainhas implode, so is everyone's own world falls apart, slowly, despite their senseless existence - apparently. They've got a strategy, a way to survive, a way to love, a way to cope. In Vanda's room some of the Fontaínhas people go in and Vanda also moves around Fontaínhas. This is not a movie about a neighbourhood and it is, it's about the micro and the macro focus, with specific and universal feelings. In the end, we are all a house who implodes against will.

fullfemale Other viewers are apparently moved by what they see on the screen- a tale of social and moral decay, and a call to our sympathies and outrage. The film doesn't appeal to me in that way, because I can't help but be aware of the filmmaker, whose presence looms over everything and who is the real character of the film. What's he's done is gone into a poetically haunting and inherently tragic environment and attempted to "capture" it. In this sense the film is closer to photography than to a film, although it retains a sort of loose narrative. The fact that we do look down on these people and make moral judgments about them is what make the film exploitative. Costa takes the most disenfranchised, powerless people with no will to live and makes a career and critical fame from it, while the drug addicts in the film stay where they are, which is hopeless and dying, and then we get to hear from him when he screens the film that many did die. In this sense it's almost a SNUFF film. Of course we are going to feel something about that, especially when it is all beautifully lit and framed to look like a painting. Costa claims to admire John Ford. Well, John Ford was making myths, and so is Costa. I just question the sort of myth-making he is engaging in, and the moral implications of it. He gets to sit around and live with these people who are dying, capture them aesthetically with his camera, get them to work and learn lines and repeat their own dialogues for camera takes without pay, and then takes these voyeuristic images and shows them to a privileged middle-class Western audience to admire at film festivals,so they can "feel a little something."If he had used actors I would feel differently, but then the film would have a totally different quality. Actors are paid to be used like props and furniture, and actors are not usually captured in the state of dying.

geoff k I found myself wondering, 'what is real in this film, and what did the director add, if anything?' It is a portrait of everyone, not just 'lowly' drug users. And no, the reviewer who claimed a 'well trained dog' could film a movie such as this is probably a 12 year old, especially since many scenes do not take place in a)a structure being demolished, b) many characters depicted are not using drugs, and etc etc... just a terrible review from someone whose favorite movie is probably 'Thor'. I also loved the soundscapes - all of the noise of commerce, music, and yes, demolition. I think it is interesting to witness the visual transformation that occurs within this trilogy of films. Very poetic and empathetic; loving, almost.

valadas This movie follows somehow in the wake of the Eye Cinema or Cinema of Truth (Dziga Vertov, Jean Rouch etc.) though with a much different and unusual subject: the everyday life of a group of drug addicts living in a degraded quarter of the outskirts of Lisbon. It's performed almost entirely by non-actors I mean by the drug addicts themselves who live before the camera as if it was not there, in a remarkable and genuine display of realism which impresses deeply our minds and feelings. These people whom we see verging slowly towards their own moral and physical ruin move before our eyes like ghosts still endowed with conscience and sentiments, capable of reasoning about their own disgrace in a very lucid way which makes us feel that we are in front of human beings after all, worth of our comprehension and compassion not to mention the fact of our own responsibility for that situation in this strange society we live in. This is the best movie about drug addicts I've ever seen and it should be seen mainly by those who persist in ignoring this problem or who think that it can be solved by fighting production and distribution of drugs instead of trying to fight consumption I mean deviating people chiefly youngsters from the inclination to consume drugs which will allow them to evade hardship and dullness of life. Although if it will be necessary to reform society for that purpose. The camera has apparently no leading role in this movie almost limiting itself to show us those people living (?) before our eyes. Their gestures, words, looks and above all their silences have so much weight on our hearts and minds that they are almost unbearable. After seeing this movie we can but feel that we all must do something and quickly.