Flavia Dima

In October 2025 at the 63rd edition of the Viennale, Sabzian sat down for a talk with Lucrecia Martel, discussing how Nuestra Tierra echoes political concerns found throughout her body of work, the pitfalls of thinking of cinema in terms of fictions versus documentary, the trappings of both style and of the film industry, and how to integrate a very diverse array of imagery into a cohesive whole. Martel: “[T]he film, beyond the historical questions, is also a reflection on my own work. I’m someone who ended up making cinema. I never even said that I wanted to be a director or anything like that. But, well, it became my work. And it’s a reflection on what this work is, how powerful it can be.”

In the following discussion, which took place in September 2023 in Bucharest during a masterclass that followed a screening of Costa’s latest short film, As Filhas do Fogo [The Daughters of Fire] (2023), Costa sketches an autobiography that is subjective (and thus, slightly incomplete). He discusses his experience of the Carnation Revolution as a teenager and his days as a student of history at the University of Lisbon, where his contract with the geographer and historian Orlando Ribeiro left a deep imprint on him. Describing his films up to his 2006 magnum opus, Juventude em marcha [Colossal Youth] (2006), Costa focused in particular on the revelatory experience of his second feature, Casa de Lava (1994), and the moment of rupture and revelation that was No quarto da vanda [In Vanda’s Room] (2000).