Banzo

Banzo (2024) is a historical drama you can watch online on iFILM. The year is 1907, the place a Portuguese cocoa plantation on Príncipe Island, and the patients are enslaved workers wasting away from no fever at all — only a homesickness so deep the locals give it a name: banzo.

A doctor named Afonso is sent to cure it. He leads a group of starving men into the forest, trying to grasp what is killing them from the inside: not an illness but a severed bond with home, a slow refusal to keep living far from the land they were stolen from. The longer he watches them, the clearer it becomes that the line between healing and confinement is one he himself has drawn, and that the colonial order he serves is the sickness.

Director Margarida Cardoso shoots it slow and severe, trusting silence where another film would cue the strings. Carloto Cotta plays the doctor. This Portuguese-German-French-Dutch co-production approaches slavery not through on-screen brutality but through what it does to the soul, which lands harder. Save it for a night you can sit with something quiet and heavy. Stream Banzo (2024) online on iFILM.