“So we make films on high seas. And as we do not have a book of laws, we work in a very dark area, which is memory, because our material is memory.”
Pedro Costa
“Ventura is neither an old immigrant answering questions from a documentary maker about his life, neither an actor playing the role of an old immigrant. He is a man who plays his life again, his life and that of his fellowmen, who plays it again like the present charged with an entire history, and for this he only has one body, a body with the marks his life has left on it, one single body in one single time, to show the passage of forty years on the worker’s bodies.”
Jacques Rancière1
“Ever since Costa proceeded into Fontaínhas for the first time, a quarter in the periphery of Lisbon, he made it his life’s work to document the lives of its inhabitants, many among them immigrants from Cape Verde. In Cavalo dinheiro, old and sick Ventura, also the majestic protagonist in Costa’s Juventude em marcha [Colossal Youth] (2006), wanders around in his own shattered memories, in which delusion and reality, present and past intertwine inextricably. He relives his past full of violence and broken dreams and at the same time plays the young Ventura, just arrived in Portugal to work on the construction sites like many others. Costa reconstructs Ventura’s life, haunted by the roar of history, into a mythological journey to the underworld and back.”
Zéro de conduite2
- 1Jacques Rancière, “Cavalo dinheiro”,Trafic n° 95, Automne 2015 (Paris: Éditions P.O.L) [This fragment was translated into English by Sabzian] Read our Dutch translation of Rancière’s text “Cavalo dinheiro” in our article section
- 2Read the Sabzian publication on Cavalo dinheiro featuring Jacques Rancière’s text as well as our own Dutch translation. This publication was made on the occasion of a screening of Cavalo dinheiro, which had no release in Belgium, organized by Zéro de conduite in collaboration with Courtisane.
