Margarida Cardoso has been exploring post-colonialism her entire career, both in documentaries including “Natal 71” and “Kuxa Kanema – O Nascimento do Cinema,” and in such features as “A Costa dos Murmúrios,” “Yvone Kane” and now “Banzo.”
“This is one more attempt to shed light on the dark zones that we still have in this colonial space,” the Portuguese filmmaker told Casey Loving during a conversation that was part of TheWrap’s Screening Series.
“Banzo,” Portugal’s Oscars submission for international feature film, takes place in 1907 on a plantation island off the African coast. When the servants begin dying of starvation or taking their own lives by other means, succumbing to a deep homesickness called “banzo,” Afonso, a white European doctor (Carloto Cotta), is brought in to cure the ailing — and, crucially, keep the plantation running. He invites a photographer, Alphonse (Hoji Fortuna), to document the servants’ brutal treatment, with the effects of slavery still powerful even after its legal abolition.
As a child, Cardoso lived in Mozambique for 15 years, during the war of independence from Portugal. The horrors she witnessed there have haunted her and remain a recurring theme in her work. The idea for “Banzo” came after she spent time on São Tomé and Príncipe, plantation islands once under colonial rule.
“I was very interested in the system of the plantation,” she said. “All plantations in the world, I suppose in those times, had hospitals and the structure for health [care] … to take care of these enslaved persons or forced laborers [who are] seen as just pieces of a system. And this touched me, all these efforts to maintain the person’s life and good health for working.”
From there, she began exploring the idea of homesickness as a force that dismantles systemized brutality: the plantation can only thrive if the servants are alive to work it. In one particularly devastating scene, a mother refuses to eat in order to nourish her baby, reasoning that they will be reunited in the afterlife. (Cardoso found similar historical instances during her research.)
While writing the script, Cardoso paid close attention to each character’s agency, knowing that Alfonso could easily fall into a pernicious trope. “He may look like a white savior … But I didn’t want this. I wanted to be as ambiguous as human beings can be,” she said. “All the characters have very little agency over their lives — even the administrator of the plantation … because there are two men or two bosses that are in Lisbon. So my my idea is that, in fact, the only persons that have a certain agency, unfortunately, are the enslaved persons that are destroying or being threats to this plantation system with the agency over their own lives.”
Shooting on São Tomé and Príncipe was a challenging experience, physically and emotionally. Under blazing temperatures and swampy humidity, they were surrounded by plantation ruins, a tangible reminder of what transpired there last century. “For me, the sets are not only something that is behind or some kind of décor, but it’s a place where people can live — the team and the actors — the nearest as possible to … the genesis of the film, want to to convey somehow,” she concluded. “So that was very difficult to film.”
