With the dreamlike film Horse Money,Costa has returned to his most powerful and enduring subject: the Cape Verdean diaspora who inhabit Lisbon’s shadows. He explains how the project began as a collaboration with the US rapper and poetIn the world of independent film, nothing comes cheaper than talk of going guerrilla, or of doing it all external the system on minimal budgets. But Pedro Costa is one film-maker who can genuinely claim to enact things differently. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw once described the Portuguese director as “the Samuel Beckett of cinema” – which certainly honours the austerity of Costa’s vision. But you could also call him cinema’s Vincent van Gogh – an artist who has turned his back on the worldlier ways of film to find an intense,troubling poetry in urban life at its most disadvantaged.
Costa’s modern film Horse Money is his latest to feature unemployed members of Lisbon’s Cape Verdean immigrant community, all playing themselves. Neither fairly fiction nor documentary, and Horse Money most resembles a dream,following the nocturnal wanderings of a man in his 70s, João Tavares Borges, and aka Ventura. The film’s title may suggest a racetrack thriller,but a more literal translation of the Portuguese original Cavalo Dinheiro would be A Horse Named Money – Dinheiro being a horse that Ventura owned in his youth on the Cape Verde islands, the former Portuguese colony off north-west Africa. Ventura – a man with an imposing, and somewhat priestly demeanour - previously starred in Costas Colossal Youth,a similarly poetic work that proved too severe for a large section of the Cannes audience when it played in competition there in 2006. “I’m sure you’ll never see a film like that in Cannes again,” chuckles Costa when he speaks to me on the phone from Lisbon.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com