Following Bones and preceding Colossal Youth, In Vanda’s Room is the second part of Pedro Costa's Fontainhas trilogy. Centred on the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte, the film is an unflinching and fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalised people in a single Lisbon neighbourhood.

Working with just a two-person crew, Costa presents the daily routines of Vanda and her neighbours with disarming matter-of-factness and rigorous formalism. Individuals whom many would see as disposable become vivid and vital in Costa’s eyes. In Vanda’s Room was Costa’s first use of digital video, and its evocative images remain some of the medium’s most astonishing.