Margarida Cardoso’s “Banzo,” which plays in the main competition section of Karlovy Vary Film Festival this week, is a deeply evocative consideration of the literal heartbreak of colonialism in Africa. It was filmed on location on the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, where ruins remain today of the cocoa plantations her characters populate.
Profits for the Portuguese plantation owners would be extraordinary and, they tell themselves, they are not slaveowners but employ African workers who chose to labor for them. That delusion is laid bare quickly as workers begin to collapse from a mysterious ailment in the fields while others hang themselves or begin to eat dirt rather than carry on with their labors.
This fatal form of longing for the homes and families they’ve been ripped from has a name among the workers, it turns out, even as it mystifies the doctor brought in to right the situation: Banzo.
Profits for the Portuguese plantation owners would be extraordinary and, they tell themselves, they are not slaveowners but employ African workers who chose to labor for them. That delusion is laid bare quickly as workers begin to collapse from a mysterious ailment in the fields while others hang themselves or begin to eat dirt rather than carry on with their labors.
This fatal form of longing for the homes and families they’ve been ripped from has a name among the workers, it turns out, even as it mystifies the doctor brought in to right the situation: Banzo.
- 7/6/2024
- by Will Tizard
- Variety Film + TV
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