From March 27 - May 31, Grasshopper Film is making Vitalina Varela available to stream via their website. Your screening of the film supports Acropolis Cinema and the Lumiere Music Hall.
A film of deeply concentrated beauty, acclaimed filmmaker Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela stars nonprofessional actor Vitalina Varela in an extraordinary performance based on her own life. Vitalina plays a Cape Verdean woman who has travelled 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. 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. (Grasshopper)
The best movie of the year.
- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Sight & Sound
A ravishing masterpiece. Gorgeous. Dreamlike. Transcendent.
- Eric Kohn, Indiewire
Spellbinding. Dazzling. Conjures chiaroscuro wonder after chiaroscuro wonder.
- Neil Young, The Hollywood Reporter
Spectacular images, ideas, emotions, and performances… several glorious outdoor sequences…have the visionary rapture of scenes by John Ford.
- Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Gorgeously photographed. Has a conceptual rigor comparable to the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet and a visual beauty that evokes Rembrandt.
- J. Hoberman, The New York Review of Books
(Available to download after screening date)