“The fourth part of a chronicle of Cape Verdean immigrants living in a nearly vanished neighborhood in Lisbon, Fontainhas, Horse Money is in many ways a quantum leap for Pedro Costa. For a director who cites his influences as Jacques Tourneur, John Ford and Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, Costa had previously restrained himself, ever so slightly, from many of the stylistic flourishes of his mentors. Costa’s collaborative working relationship with real-life subjects, including Ventura, central to Ossos, Colossal Youth, and in Horse Money, who play versions of themselves on-screen, and were previously documented moments ‘in the now.’ With Horse Money, the history of Ventura, an impoverished laborer who spends the majority of the film in a cavernous medical facility, rises to the surface and Costa’s palate expands.
“In what is a film about collateral damage of the 1974 left-wing coup in Portugal, ending generations of a fascist dictatorship, Horse Money feels like an exorcism of unaddressed privilege. For Ventura and African immigrants alike, this period was about suffering: in a sequence built on light and shadows, Ventura takes a knife wound to the head by a member of the revolutionary army. While in a hospital, Ventura still believes it is 1974, and in a nearly half-hour sequence towards the end of the film, listens to the extended soliloquy of a revolutionary soldier, painted silver, an attempt to close the wounds that had been fully opened for nearly forty years.
“But, like all great films, in Horse Money, images and sound lead and ‘psychology follows.’ This is a deeply personal film for Costa, as his youth was defined by and aligned with this revolution, and with that he moves closer to Ventura and his style deepens. With bursts of color and light, often shot at night, and a collapse in the distinction between past and present, Horse Money is Costa at his most expressionist, and it is possibly the most haunted film made since Chadi Abdel Salam’s Al-Mummia.” ~ Michael Lieberman
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