Vanda Duarte is a heroin addict living in Fontainhas, a slum district on the outskirts of Lisbon. She's the nominal star of this film, playing herself (as is everyone else in the film) usually smoking heroin and/or talking to someone else in her bedroom. The film follows her and other residents of the district taking drugs, working makeshift jobs and living in cramped, dilapidated rooms. There's no plot per se, but threads emerge as we return to the same people over the course of nearly three hours. A way of life emerges, and one that's threatened as we see the neighborhood slowing being torn down around them in the interests of urban renewal.

A three hour film with no real plot told in long static shots is a hard sell for many folks, but I found this to compelling and frequently mesmerizing. Usually I want a film to tell me a story, but sometimes taking me somewhere very different and dropping me in is enough ... and this film really drops you right in.

There's real art to this too. Pedro Costa composes his shots beautifully and uses minimal, natural lighting to create visuals not unlike Renaissance paintings. People sit in small pools of light with fairly vivid colors surrounded by pools of utter blackness. It creates real beauty out of squalor.

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.