Festival Special • Visions du Réel • Atelier 2025

"There is a huge world to discover, and it is not to be found on the most illuminated paths." (Cláudia Varejão in an interview for Visions du Réel)

Portuguese filmmaker and photographer Cláudia Varejão has developed a distinct cinematic voice—gentle, attentive, and deeply attuned to the ways people move through the world and through each other. In this curated program of seven works available on DAFilms, we invite you into Varejão’s intimate, luminous cinema where silence speaks volumes, and bodies often say more than words ever could.

Varejão’s films, whether fiction or documentary, unfold with a striking visual sensitivity and an unhurried rhythm that favors gesture over dialogue; embodied communication over verbal language. That shows both in her early fiction work, such as the trilogy of shorts Weekend (2007), Cold Day (2009), Morning Light (2012), and in her more recent documentary feature Amor Fati (2020), in which she captures the everyday tenderness between people and their close ones (both human and animal). The key subject of the films is relationships, but the intimacy is never forced—it emerges, quietly, through repetition, attention, and trust.

Attentive to the interconnectedness of the world, Varejão captures communities, particularly the vulnerable ones, saying herself that she “believes that the answers to so many social and political problems lie at the margins of our systems”. In Ama-San (2016), she focuses on traditional female Japanese divers collecting seafood and shells to sell. In In The Darkness of the Theather I Take off my Shoes (2016), she observes the National Ballet of Portugal, focusing on the institution as a whole, with all its dancers, choreographers, musicians, seamstresses, and technicians.

Varejão pays attention to how people move through the world and embody their daily presence, with one element making a continuous reappearance in her oeuvre - the water. Being a former swimmer herself, she often captures people bathing or moving completely submerged, with three of the films in this selection containing fascinating underwater footage. We’ll leave the pleasure of discovering the particular films to you.

You can read an interview with Varejão in Visions du Réel’s Journal.