I

In the last ten years, the Portuguese director Pedro Costa has established himself firmly in the international film-festival circuit. His films have been shown to critical acclaim in Canada, the USA, Japan and Europe, and a recent retrospective at Tate Modern (in autumn 2009) has given his name further resonance in contemporary art contexts. Those who do not care much about cinema or contemporary art but follow Jacques Rancière's writings have had the chance to come across the director's name on more than one occasion. In Rancière's theoretical framework, Costa plays the role of an upright counterpart to the political endeavours of those artists associated with Relational Aesthetics, a movement that, according to Rancière, lacks integrity and shows how 'the attempt to overcome the inherent tension of a politics of art leads straight to its opposite'.¹ In No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda's Room, 2000), on the contrary, Rancière identifies a force 'that lies in the tensions between the settings of a miserable life and its inherent aesthetic possibilities'.²

At first glance, it seems difficult to reconcile what has become known as the Fontainhas trilogy - Ossos (Bones, 1997), No Quarto da Vanda and Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth, 2006), all of them set in the poor Lisbon neighbourhood of Fontainhas - with Costa's beginnings as a director. (The Criterion Collection has recently released this trilogy in a DVD box set titled 'Letters from Fontainhas'.) In terms of production, the turning point in his career comes with Vanda. After Vanda, all of his films, including the documentary on Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (Où gît votre sourire enfoui?, or Where Does Your