RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil – Fantastic:Brasil debuted at this year’s Rio Film Festival as a new industry platform for genre cinema in the largest country in South America. The initiative is a partnership between the Fantastic Pavilion Cannes, Rio Market, Festival do Rio, FICCI Industria, #LINK Documentary Industry Meeting, Mórbido Film Fest, and Sitges, and launched three calls for emerging voices in Latin American genre cinema. The initiative’s first edition is being held over Oct. 2-7 at Armazém da Utopia, the home of the festival’s industry arm, RioMarket.
The initiative was conceived as a platform for the development, training, pitching, and international circulation of fantastic film projects. It brings together a collaborative network comprising the Fantastic Pavilion Cannes; Fantastic Embassy EFM Berlinale; Sitges – International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia; Festival do Rio; FICCI Industria, the industry program of the Cartagena de Indias International Film Festival; #LINK, a documentary industry meeting held in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro; Mexico’s Mórbido Film Fest, and Sanfic Industry in Chile. Founder of Mórbido Film Fest and executive director of the Fantastic Pavilion at the Marché du Film, Pablo Guisa Koestinger was in Rio for the first time to walk an industry aidinece through the initiative’s activities, which culminated in a pitching session and roundtable on Monday evening.
Speaking with Variety at the event, the veteran said the Pavilion’s role in Fantastic:Brasil is “to connect the territory to the pipeline.” “The fantastic is being made everywhere in the world, in every language and on every budget,” he adds. The problem is circulation. A project developed in Rio should be able to find its partners in Colombia, Santiago, Mexico, Los Angeles, Berlin, Cannes, Abu Dhabi, and travel the world the way these stories deserve.
We are making that possible. We are building the Fantastic Nation.” At the end of the project presentations, Guisa told the audience at RioMarket he was “very happy with this first edition of Fantastic: Brasil, and I am confident we will watch films presented here coming out over the next few years, and you’ll all be able to tell everyone you heard about them first here at the Rio Film Festival.” For its inaugural edition, Fantastic:Brasil featured three independent calls, each focused on a specific area of Latin American fantastic cinema. WomanInFan Brasil, the Brazilian edition of the program created by the Sitges Film Festival, dedicated to fantastic genre projects directed by Brazilian women; Monstra – Fantastic Queer Lab, a call for queer fantastic genre projects from across Latin America, presented in partnership with Mórbido Film Fest and its #LGBTerror section; and #LINK Vertical, a program dedicated to the creation, production and international circulation of audiovisual works conceived natively for the vertical 9:16 format.
Under the concept True Dystopic, the #LINK Vertical program brings together auteur documentary and genre cinema, using real locations in Rio de Janeiro as settings for imagining speculative futures. Each call included between four and six projects, with the chosen teams participating in a development lab and pitch sessions with industry professionals. Through the resulting network, selected projects may have access to presentation and circulation opportunities at partner events and platforms, including the Fantastic Pavilion at the Marché du Film in Cannes, the Fantastic Embassy at Berlin’s European Film Market, FICCI in Cartagena de Indias, and Mórbido Film Fest in Mexico City.
In this sense, Fantastic:Brasil creates an international circulation pathway connecting Rio de Janeiro, Cartagena de Indias, Mexico City, Berlin, and Cannes. See the Fantastic:Brasil award winners below: Fantastic Round Robin Award, Fantastic Pavilion, Marché du Film, Cannes “Entranhas” (MONSTRA, Fantastic Queer Lab), dir. Lucas Procópio Caetano, Fourfé Filmes (Limeira, SP) While getting ready for a show, drag queen Anorma tells three stories to her audience: a single person, bound, gagged, and blindfolded.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
