This film was released on Friday 18th September 2015 and is no longer screening.

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Tying with Leviathan as Sight & Sound’s third best film of 2014, Horse Money is the sixth feature from Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa, hailed by The New Yorker as ‘one of the most important and original directors working today’. Named after an impoverished Lisbon neighbourhood, Horse Money is, like much of the director’s work, concerned with the experience of some of the city’s most marginalised, dispossessed citizens. While there is a discernible narrative, structured around a 60-year-old Cape Verdean immigrant called Ventura, the film is primarily distinguished by its tenebrous, dream-like quality and there is a sense that the setting is some kind of afterlife where characters consider their lives and the consequences of unerring adversity.

However, because no attempt is made to present this with any degree of realism, we are instead brokered into a different existential zone, one which is stark, deeply expressive and compelling. (Notes by Alice Butler.)

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