"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 Rancière
After three compilation programmes with shorter films, Zéro de conduite chose to show only one film this time: the wonderful Cavalo dinheiro [Horse Money] (2014), Pedro Costa’s latest film. This evening, in collaboration with Courtisane, will be the launch of a short screening tour of the film in Brussels and throughout Flanders.
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.
PT, 2014, 115'
PT spoken, EN subtitles
With: Ventura, Vitalina Varela, Tito Furtado, António Santos, Benvindo Tavares.
Directed by: Pedro Costa
Cinematography: Leonardo Simões, Pedro Costa
Sound: Olivier Blanc, Vasco Pedroso
Editor: João Dias
Sound editing: Hugo Leitão, Ève Corrêa-Guedes
Music: Os Tubarões
Producer: Abel Ribeiro Chaves
This evening will be the launch of a short playing tour of the film in Brussels and throughout Flanders.
After three programmes with shorter films, Zéro de conduite (in collaboration with Courtisane & Beursschouwburg) chooses to show only one film this time: the wonderful Cavalo dinheiro (2014), the latest film by Pedro Costa.
Zéro de conduite:
In 2013 the documentary cinematographers Elias Grootaers, Olivia Rochette and Gerard-Jan Claes set up the production and distribution platform Zéro de Conduite. The name is a reference to Jean Vigo’s 1933 film of the same name, a lyrical ode to youthful rebellion. During the past year Zéro de Conduite presented three evening programmes. A film evening with music by Joachim Badenhorst, an evening about the film Chuyen tu te (The Story of Kindness or How to Behave) (1985/1987) by the Vietnamese documentary maker Tran Van Thuy and a programme on (performing, creating, expressive, talking, caressing, stealing,...) hands: Schaffende Hände.
http://www.zerodeconduite.be/
Courtisane:
As a festival and platform to showcase film, Courtisane makes a resolute choice for adventure and reflection. Courtisane’s programmation constitutes a kaleidoscopic mosaic of styles, media, gestures, languages and emotions; a patchwork of recent and historical works that share an insatiable hunger for experimentation, a personal signature, and a sense of resistance. Courtisane has been organizing a yearly festival since 2002.
