Cinematic works ‘On Falling’ by Laura Carreira and ‘O Riso e a Faca’ by Pedro Pinho are contenders for the Goya Award for Best European Film. ‘Banzo’ by Margarida Cardoso is vying in the Best Ibero-American Film category.
‘Banzo’ is a fictional narrative set at the beginning of the 20th century on a tropical African island, depicting the violent relationships between Portuguese colonizers and enslaved Black workers.
The film features Carloto Cotta as a metropolitan doctor sent to the island to heal a group of Black slaves, forcibly taken to plantations, who are dying from deep sorrow.
The term “banzo” refers to the nostalgia experienced by enslaved individuals, forcibly removed from Africa to work on Brazilian plantations, feeling out of place and homesick. Essentially, it was a form of depression, Margarida Cardoso explained in a 2024 interview.
‘On Falling’ marks Laura Carreira’s debut feature film, shot in Scotland, where she resides. The story revisits themes from her short films ‘Red Hill’ (2018) and ‘The Shift’ (2020): labor.
In the film, Aurora, played by Joana Santos, is a young Portuguese woman emigrating in Scotland, working as a ‘picker’ in a warehouse, collecting products purchased by consumers from a specific brand or store.
Faced with monotonous, solitary, repetitive, dehumanizing, and underpaid work, Aurora struggles to make ends meet and feels alienated, alone, and unable to socialize at work or at home, which she shares with other immigrants.
In an interview, Carreira suggested that the film may serve as a contribution and a warning from her generation about the value and importance of work.
‘O Riso e a Faca’ is Pedro Pinho’s second feature film, debuting in May at the Cannes Film Festival in France, earning actress Cleo Diára an acting award.
The film chronicles Sérgio, an environmental engineer traveling to “a West African metropolis” to work for a non-governmental organization, tasked with making decisions on the construction of a road between the desert and the jungle, according to the synopsis by producers Uma Pedra no Sapato and Terratreme Filmes.
As Sérgio acclimates to the new environment, he “engages in an intimate but unbalanced relationship with two local residents, Diara and Gui. As he navigates the neocolonial dynamics of the expatriate community, this fragile bond becomes his sole refuge from isolation or barbarity.”
Filmed in Africa, the movie features performances by Sérgio Coragem, Cleo Diára, and Jonathan Guilherme in the lead roles.
The 40th edition of the Goya Awards, presented by the Spanish Film Academy, is scheduled for February 14 in Barcelona.
