“Zicartola: Dawn of Samba” investigates how cultural memory survives when its physical traces have disappeared. At its center is the legendary Zicartola, a short-lived samba house opened in Rio de Janeiro in the early 60s, a space where artists, poets, and revolutionaries from all corners of Brazil converged, created, and dreamed a different version of Brazil. One that embraced Black Culture and its ancestry. Tragically, the restaurant lasted only over a year.

Zicartola was envisioned by Dona Zica and Cartola, the most iconic samba couple that ever lived. Cartola, founder of Estação Primeira da Mangueira, was a musical genius whose life was marked by repeated erasure. And Dona Zica, his life companion, created a sanctuary through cooking, care, and persistence, where daily practice became ritual, and ritual became culture.

Today, the building stands empty, and visual records of its existence are scarce. Faced with this absence, the film does not attempt a traditional historical reconstruction. Instead, it follows D2 through graveyards, samba houses, and studios, as his search for Zicartola and its missing fragments becomes a contemporary act of reactivation. Moving through rehearsals, recordings, shared meals, interactions, and jams with musicians and cultural bearers connected directly or (indirectly) to Zicartola’s legacy, D2 engages with fragments that resist being assembled into a complete past.

Together, they rework songs associated with the space, creating new arrangements that lead toward a live performance. Each chapter of this film, or as we labeld them: “record track”, functions as a narrative trigger, opening partial windows onto a history largely erased from official archives but carried forward through bodies, food, and music.

Guided by the thought of Abdias do Nascimento and the epistemology of the “Teatro Experimental do Negro,” (The Black Experimental Theater, in free translation), the film approaches reenactment as a political gesture: memory not as something preserved intact, but as a practice that only exists when performed, cooked, sung, and shared.

Dona Zica’s presence structures the film even in her absence. Her cooking, long overshadowed by the legendary figures who passed through Zicartola, emerges as a foundational act of care and resistance. Ultimately, the final live performance does not resolve the investigation; it marks a provisional gathering. Zicartola: Dawn of Samba argues that cultural legacy is never fixed. It survives through fragile, collective practices, continually reactivated in the face of disappearance.