Horse Money

Ventura is in a hospital. His age is unclear, his hands shake, and he does not know where he is. He walks the corridors and talks with people he once knew, and the conversations move between the present and 1974. The story of Cape Verdean workers living in Lisbon during the Carnation Revolution is told from somewhere between remembering and delirium. Pedro Costa directs. Ventura plays himself; Costa has worked with him for years. Costa's method sits between documentary and fiction and belongs fully to neither. The performers are real people speaking from their own lives, but the scenes are written, the framing is meticulous and the light is entirely constructed. He works with a small digital camera, a very small crew, and over a long period. The image is the centre. Nearly every shot is static, dark and deep; faces emerge out of blackness and the space usually reads as a corridor or a cell. It is the most praised and the most exhausting thing about the film. The lift sequence is the best known passage: a long conversation between Ventura and a soldier inside a lift that never opens. It won the directing prize at Locarno. Who it is for: viewers interested in contemporary art cinema and in the traces of Portuguese colonial history. Who it is not for: there is almost no narrative, the scenes are very long, and the film makes no information easy.