Brazil Is Cannes’ Country Of Honor In 2025 Amid Industry Comeback

The scenes of celebration across Brazil in Carnival season when Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here won the Best International Feature Film Oscar in March were akin to the country winning the World Cup.

The excitement followed a post-pandemic record-breaking $35.6 million box office in Brazil for the drama starring Fernanda Torres as real-life figure Eunice Paiva, whose husband Rubens Paiva disappeared from their home in the early years of Brazil’s 1964-85 military dictatorship.

“That explosion of joy in the middle of the Carnival, which is the peak of our popular culture and the best of Brazil, the best of our collective capacity to actually say who we are, was extraordinary,” says Salles.

The victory came hot on the heels of the Berlinale Grand Jury Prize win for Brazilian filmmaker and visual artist Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Traila dystopian drama about a 77-year-old retiree’s life-changing journey through the Amazon rainforest.

Three months later, Brazil is out in force at the Cannes Film Festival with the selection of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s political thriller The Secret Agent starring Mauro Wagner in the main competition. It is also the Country of Honor at the Cannes Marché du Film, with a delegation of film professionals expected on the Croisette, led by Minister of Culture Margareth Menezes, who also happens to be the queen of Brazilian Afropop.

Elsewhere on the Croisette, Marianna Brennand, whose female-driven drama Manas earned the Director’s Award in Venice’s parallel section Giornate degli Autori in 2024, is being feted with the Women in Motion Emerging Talent Award.

“It’s not just a coincidence, it’s an astral connection,” jokes André Sturm, founder and president of promotional body Cinema Do Brasil, on the market honor.

“We were first offered the honor by the market two years ago… We didn’t know about the Walter Salles movie. We couldn’t have imagined the success,” he explains.

The acceptance of the offer was spurred rather by left-wing Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s promise on his arrival in power in October 2022 to bolster the cultural sector.

Aside from his ideological belief in the importance of culture, Lula also wants to make it a key part of the economy and job creation, particularly for younger generations.

“Audiovisual production is the strength of our cultural sector,” Menezes says. “Despite political persecution and a lack of robust investment, the technical quality and talent of the sector’s artistic community are undeniable.”

Under this drive, $295 million has been earmarked for the film and TV sector to date. Lula’s investment plans are astute. According to the national cinema agency Ancine, the audiovisual sector added $5 billion to GDP in 2023, and this figure is set to rise.

The drive also makes Brazil an outlier in Latin America, where many other territories are slashing cultural budgets and censorship is on the rise. The most acute example is Argentina, where the far-right President Javier Milei has decimated the film sector.

Brazil’s cinema industry is recovering from its own brush with populism and authoritarianism under the 2019-2022 rule of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. During his time in power, which coincided with the pandemic, Bolsonaro disbanded the Ministry of Culture, cut cinema funding, and censored publicly funded projects. Menezes describes the federal government’s $295 million investment as a “rescue operation for the sector” following years of Bolsonaro’s cuts.

“When we arrived, we found a wasteland of investments, a true chaos that was not easy to build,” the Minister says.

Producer Tatiana Leite moved to France during Covid, “exactly because of the lack of everything during the Bolsonaro government.”

“I could not work,” says the producer. She is now co-producing the latest feature from Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes (Grand Tour), which will be a big-budget historical drama set to shoot next year in Brazil, and developing projects from newcomers Pedro Pinho (The Nothing Factory) and Pedro Freire (Embarrassed).

Cinema do Brasil also lost most of its funding for four years but stayed afloat by piecing together financing from a variety of other sources.

“People understood the importance of what we do… after the pandemic, our booths at Cannes and Berlin looked like a Formula 1 driver’s jersey. We had many different small supporters who helped us continue our work,” says Sturm.

Veteran producer Rodrigo Teixeira suggests the Bolsonaro years were a blip in an otherwise upward trajectory for Brazilian cinema going back 25 years.

“It all really started when Central Station opened the Berlin Film Festival. From then until today, there have been a lot of great filmmakers, investment by the state, tax incentives, international partnerships, and people winning prizes outside of Brazil,” he says, who has half a dozen projects on the boil including Gabe Klinger’s Isabel.

2019 was a Bumper Year for Brazilian cinema. Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bacurau won the Cannes Jury Prize, while Karim Aïnouz’s The Invisible Life of Eurydice Gusmão clinched the Un Certain Regard award. At Venice, two Brazilian directors, Bárbara Paz and Ricardo Laganaro, won awards, and in San Sebastián, the Brazil-set drama Pacifiedbacked by Darren Aronofsky, won the top film prize.

“Bolsonaro in power combined with the pandemic killed the industry for two or three years, but we are lucky enough to have great projects, filmmakers, producers, crews, writers and stories, and we’ve started working again,” says Teixeira.

It is too soon to assess whether Lula’s audiovisual investments are bearing fruit. So far, the government has prioritized broad investments, like pushing cash into regions of the country that do not have a tradition of filmmaking. Only a portion is being used directly to fund or support projects that will ultimately land in the marketplace.

“It’s a matter of public policy. But an important part of this money will arrive in the industry, so there is excitement,” Sturm says.

There is currently an open call in the country for producers and filmmakers to submit projects for public funding, which has ignited a frenzy in the local industry.

“The last call attracted something like 1,200 applications for a national grant that will pick only a few projects, so it’s very competitive,” Leite says. “But at least we have this. Under Bolsonaro, we didn’t have anything.”

Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro Remain Brazil’s Central Hubs for Film Production. Salles’ I’m Still Here was shot entirely in the latter, which Leonardo Edde, president of RioFilme, says reinforces the city’s reputation as the “birthplace of Brazilian cinema.”

“In 2024 alone, we registered nearly 9,000 shooting days, making us the most filmed city in Latin America,” Edde says.

Lula has also spearheaded a decentralized approach to local production, opening autonomous film offices with their own funds in each of the country’s 27 states.

The Secret Agent, for example, is shot in the director’s home city of Recife, capital of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, which is also home to a growing cinema scene.

“That is huge in a country with many realities like Brazil,” Liete says. Still, funding projects and supporting local infrastructure is only part of the equation. When these films are made, where will they find their audience? Leite argues that this is where the picture becomes less clear, suggesting that bottlenecks in the distribution chain are also holding local cinema up.

“One of the biggest fragilities of our cinema is that we don’t have many independent distribution companies. We don’t have any incentives for distribution companies either. They have to fight hard to still exist,” Leite says. “For our population, we also don’t have enough movie theaters.”

As of last year, Ancine listed 3,510 operational cinema screens in Brazil. The country has a population of around 211 million. In comparison, the UK, with a population of around 68 million, has 4,587 screens.

In the backdrop, there are also questions around the impact on independent producers and the box office of the global streamers, with two bills currently passing through the legislature that would increase tax contributions and introduce quotas on national productions.

Menezes says streaming regulation is an imperative that her office is broaching with great care to protect workers’ rights and the health of the local production environment.

“It is good for those who produce, for those who finance, and for those who consume. We don’t want to tax anything; we want what is fair,” she says.

In the meantime, local streamer Globoplay recently embraced a theatrical strategy for its first two feature originals, I’m Still Here and Andrucha Waddington and Breno Silveira’s Victorygiving them long cinema windows.

Tatiana Costa, director of content for digital products at Globo, says the strategy was coordinated with all the parties on the film with the group promoting the theatrical release across all its platforms.

“We don’t want to cannibalize the cinema and vice-versa,” she says.

Commenting on the government’s film and TV drive, Globoplay Originals head of drama Alex Medeiros says it goes beyond direct subsidies, noting how a raising of the cap on state money that can be spent on an individual production had also been a game changer.

Teixeira also believes the global spotlight placed on Brazilian cinema by I’m Still Here will encourage more international investment. He is also predicting an uptick in non-Brazilian directors coming to the country to shoot, especially out of the U.S., in the current political climate.

“I was talking to an American filmmaker who told me it’s impossible for independent filmmakers to do films in the U.S. right now, because the costs are too high, and the streamers are aligned with Donald Trump… There could be options for those filmmakers here in Brazil,” he suggests.

Brazil does not currently offer a nationwide incentive, but there are a number of state- and city-based rebate schemes, notably those run by SPcine in São Paulo and RioFilme in Rio de Janeiro.

In the backdrop to this positive wave, the spectre of Bolsonaro as well as that of the military junta captured in I’m Still Here remains in the air. While Bolsonaro failed to kill off Brazilian cinema, the former stopped the country’s Cinema Nova in its tracks, leaving a void that would not be filled again until the 1990s and early ’00s with films like Central Station and City of God.

“Continuity is at the core of what will ensue, but we’re certainly living in a moment of vitality,” says Salles.

Edde describes the current moment as “a new era for the Brazilian audiovisual sector.”

“And more than just celebrating this moment,” he says. “We are ready to turn it into concrete business opportunities and social and economic development.”