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25 September 2026 — 08:00 pm

The World’s Room
Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo

A film by Diego Céspedes - M/16+
Curated by Candela Varas
Cinema · Thought

In the early 1980s, in the Chilean desert, eleven-year-old Lidia grows up within a loving queer family. Forced to the outskirts of a hostile, dust-filled mining town, her family is blamed for spreading a mysterious disease that is said to be transmitted through the gaze between two people in love.

In this modern western, Lidia seeks revenge while confronting violence, fear and hatred, with her family as her only refuge and love itself becoming the greatest danger.

The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo 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.

Winner of the Un Certain Regard Prize – Cannes Film Festival 2025

know + The World's Room

/ Artistic and technical credits

/Genre Drama  /Nationality CL · FR · DE · ES · BE  /Year 2025  
/Subtitles Portuguese · English  
/Director Diego Céspedes;

EscolaNova, Bordeira - Aljezur
25 September 2026 (fri) — 08:00 pm
Running time
1h48
Age Rating
M/16+
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
07 August 2026
Orlando Pantera
/Director Catarina Alves Costa
25 September 2026
O Misterioso olhar do Flamingo
/Director Diego Céspedes
The next films will be announced soon.