MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
HORSE MONEY
August 6, Kino Cinema 1, 4pm
(104 minutes)
Pedro Costa's Horse Money is a mesmerising accumulation of detail – of characters, faces, images, voices, spaces, places and fragments of a story that resonates beyond the boundaries of the film.
Ventura and Vitalina Varela in Pedro Costa's documentary Horse Money.
His documentary-poetic works have a singular aesthetic and force; Horse Money gives us a world of chiaroscuro, deserted corridors, a lift, crumbling walls, confined paces, a place in which individual stories play out, fiercely individual and powerfully resonant.
Costa begins with a series of stills from celebrated 19th-century New York photographer Jacob Riis, who documented a city and its poor; it then turns its attention to subjects who have been part of his filmmaking for years, Cape Verde immigrants who live in Fontainhas, a rundown neighbhourhood in Lisbon that has been the site of several of his films. His characters have a strong, tactile presence, yet they could also be apparitions, dreams or memories.
The primary figure is the elderly Ventura (from Costa's 2006 Colossal Youth), with an impassive face and jittery hands, placed at the centre of a series of scenes that are direct and elusive at the same time, a succession of ghost stories that have a political and historical immediacy.