“’We’ll keep on falling from the third floor. We’ll keep on being severed by the machines. Our head and lungs will still hurt the same… We’ll be burned… We’ll go crazy. It’s all the mould in the walls of our houses… We have always lived and we will always die like this. It’s our sickness.’ This is how one of a congregated group of Cape Verdean immigrant labourers describe their lot in Pedro Costa’s Horse Money, a film that might be subtitled ‘A Universal History of Poverty’. Costa’s film begins with an overture of images by the Danish-American photographer Jacob Riis, showing the bare, stifling tenements of New York City a century ago, yet not so far from the scenes in the Fontainhas slums in Lisbon to which Costa has returned time and again. This precedes Horse Money’s ‘contemporary’ narrative, which begins with Costa’s star and muse Ventura, wearing nothing but a pair of red briefs, descending a gloomy stairwell into the bowels of what at first looks like a stone-walled medieval dungeon, though from one shot to another it may change to appear as a clean, modern hospital. ...”
2010 May: Pedro Costa, 2020 October: Vitalina Varela (2019)
Pedro Costa
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