Horse Money

Pedro Costa has been filming the same few people in and around the Fontainhas neighbourhood of Lisbon — a Cape Verdean immigrant quarter, demolished during the years he worked there — since the 1990s. Horse Money, which won him the directing prize at Locarno in 2014, is the fourth film centred on Ventura, a retired construction worker who plays a version of himself.

Ventura is in a hospital, or something like one, at night. He is nineteen and he is also elderly. The Carnation Revolution of April 1974 is happening outside, soldiers are in the streets, and for the Cape Verdean workers who built the city the revolution is mostly a reason to stay indoors. Costa shoots in digital video with almost no light — figures emerging from black, faces lit as if by Georges de La Tour — and his non-professional performers deliver dialogue they helped write in the cadence of testimony rather than conversation. There is a sequence in a lift that runs for close to twenty minutes and is among the most extraordinary things in twenty-first-century cinema.

It asks a lot. Costa refuses exposition and refuses to distinguish memory from present tense, because his subject is a man for whom that distinction has collapsed. What he has built across these films is a body of work about immigrant labour in Europe that treats its subjects with a seriousness — visual, historical, formal — that almost nothing else in the cinema offers them.