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22 May 2026 — 08:00 pm

The World’s Room
Banzo

A film by Margarida Cardoso - M/14+
Guest Margarida Cardoso Director · Curated by Candela Varas
Cinema · Thought

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1907. Afonso begins a new life on a tropical African island as a plantation doctor, where he is tasked with treating a group of servants “infected” by banzo - the nostalgia of the enslaved. They die in large numbers, from starvation or by suicide. For fear of contagion, the group is sent to a rainy hill, surrounded by forest. There, Afonso attempts to treat them, but his inability to understand what lies within them proves stronger than any remedy.

This time, the invited guest sharing her perspective on the film is the director herself, Margarida Cardoso, who will lead the conversation with the audience.

Banzo is part of EscolaNova’s cinema cycle, The World’s Room — a meeting place where cinema asserts itself as a tool for reflection and change, curated by Candela Varas.

Cannes Film Festival 2025 :: Jury Prize

know + The World's Room

/ Artistic and technical credits

/Genre Drama  /Nationality PT  /Year 2024  
/Subtitles Portuguese · English  
/Director and screenplay Margarida Cardoso  
/Cast Carloto Cotta, Hoji Fortuna, Rúben Simões, Gonçalo Waddington  
/Distribuition Uma Pedra no Sapato  

EscolaNova, Bordeira - Aljezur
22 May 2026 (fri) — 08:00 pm
Running time
127 min
Age Rating
M/14+
Tickets
5€ Single

Ticket office
The World’s Room
Curated by Candela Varas


A dark room, a white wall, a few chairs and cushions on a wool rug, or the warm summer open air. Each month, a new film appears, always accompanied by a special person, carefully chosen.

We believe that a film, after being screened, can continue to expand in a dialogue between the audience and someone we invite to think together. This person’s role is to guide the audience through a conversation that goes beyond what the work has already brought us - someone capable of offering unexpected perspectives, suggesting new readings and challenging perceptions.

We ask whether a film can open itself to other worlds beyond its own, and we pursue the richness of oblique viewpoints - those that lead us along transversal paths of thinking and feeling.

NIn this second edition, The World’s Room deepens this proposal, recovering the enchantment of the seventh art through a sharp, poetic, political, social and psychological contemporary cinema, with a selection of films curated by Candela Varas, in dialogue with guests from different fields of knowledge. One film and one person. One spectacle of images that we watch and then intuit within ourselves.


About the film selection, by Candela Varas

The Breath

The poetic word is born from breath, from the airy matter that passes through the body before becoming voice, rhythm and meaning. A poem is, above all, an organisation of breath. If poetry is made of air, cinema also breathes - not only because it is made of sound and silence, but above all because it is an art of time, pulse and oscillation. To think cinema through breathing is to shift the gaze from the image as surface to the image as duration.

This cycle invites us to think of films as a respiratory grammar, with their rhythm and metre: between cuts, silences and long takes, each work proposes its own cadence, alternating moments of full breath and held breath. It is also to notice how bodies and their breathing are filmed, and how we, as an audience, end up breathing with the film, feeling its pulse and inhabiting its time.
Detailed programme

30 January 2026
The Last Blue
/Director Gabriel Mascaro  /Guest Anabela Roque
20 February 2026
Living the Land
/Director Huo Meng  /Guest Telma Carvalho
27 March 2026
Looking at the Sun (In die Sonne Schauen)
/Director Mascha Schilinski  /Guest Maria João Cantinho
17 April 2026
The Stranger
/Director François Ozon  /Guest Cristina Robalo-Cordeiro
22 May 2026
Banzo
/Director Margarida Cardoso  /Guest Margarida Cardoso
The next films will be announced soon.
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