Horse Money

Pedro Costa's "Horse Money" (Cavalo Dinheiro, 2014) can be watched online on iFILM — a Portuguese drama that picked up the Silver Leopard at the 2014 Locarno Film Festival. Ventura, Costa's longtime collaborator and a real Cape Verdean immigrant in Lisbon, wanders through the film as a man whose body remembers decades of hard labor better than his mind does.

The setting is Fontainhas, a Lisbon shantytown, in the years following Portugal's 1974 Carnation Revolution. While young officers marched through history, men like Ventura slipped out of it. Costa shoots in extreme contrast — long, near-silent takes, faces cut from shadow, light that recalls Dutch Golden Age painting more than cinema.

If you can place Tarkovsky on your shelf, this belongs beside him. Slow, deliberate, and built for the kind of watching you don't do on a second screen. Stream "Horse Money" on iFILM.