On the question of whether Pedro Costa is the most important active filmmaker that mainstream film culture ignores.

Pedro Costa is a Portuguese director who has spent decades making films about the residents of Fontainhas, a Lisbon neighborhood of Cape Verdean immigrants. His films — In Vanda's Room, Colossal Youth, Vitalina Varela — are made with a method between documentary and fiction: the people who appear in them are playing versions of themselves, the situations are rehearsed but not scripted, the images are composed with a deliberateness that has nothing to do with documentary spontaneity.

Vitalina Varela won the Golden Leopard at Locarno in 2019. Almost no one outside serious cinephile circles has seen it. This is partly a distribution problem and partly a problem of expectation: the film is slow, dark, formally austere, and makes no concession to viewers who come to it without patience.

But what Costa's films do — the particular quality of attention they bring to lives that mainstream cinema has never examined — is something that I believe will be increasingly recognized as the films get older. They are not difficult. They are demanding. The difference matters.