Ventura, a Cape Verdean laborer living in the outskirts of Lisbon, is suddenly abandoned by his wife Clotilde. Ventura feels lost between the dilapidated old quarter where he spent the last 34 years and his new lodgings in a recently-built low-cost housing complex. All the young poor souls he meets seem to become his own children.
This last letter in the Fontainhas cycle – in fact, the first portrait of a trilogy centred around the magnetic Ventura, bearer of the violent social contradictions of post-revolutionary Portugal – is, like its predecessors, a turning point of formal reinvention in Pedro Costa’s career. Here, the usual notions of space and time are wrought between what is tangible and what is but memory, in what its author calls “an essay, a research on loss” prompted by the demolition of the Lisbon favela. Thus, Ventura becomes an avatar of the mythological Charon, ferrying us through the ruins of the neighbourhood, through its former inhabitants (amongst them, some familiar faces from Ossos and No Quarto da Vanda), through his own memories and, in an incredible and subversive auctorial gesture, through art history itself. Just look at this scene of extraordinary political symbolism where Ventura visits the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, simultaneously an iconoclastic indictment and act of reclaiming a denied space, both in the physical and allegorical sense. (Flavia Dima)