Amid a strong presence of Asian countries, RioMarket is launching an app to connect international film markets RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — RioMarket, the business section of the Rio International Film Festival, will be held over Oct. 1-11, featuring for the first time a partnership with TikTok and online one-on-one business meetings. The event, taking place in a warehouse in Rio’s port area renovated for the 2016 Summer Olympics, will gather execs and talents of the local and international film industry, with a strong presence of Asian countries, and will launch an app to connect festival film markets around the world. The first online one-on-one business meetings were held at RioMarket 2025 and proved successful, Walkiria Barbosa, the Rio Film Festival‘s executive director and head of international marketing, told Variety.
During the pandemic, we learned that it is possible to do business online,” she said. One of the new features of RioMarket 2026 is a partnership with TikTok, Barbosa said. The social media giant will hold at the event a three-day workshop for 40 TikTok content creators invited by the company from several states in Brazil.
The program’s aim is to improve the quality of the content they produce through technical sessions on directing, lighting, editing, screenwriting, format development, filming, and other areas of individual content production. We believe Festival do Rio, which brings together the leading players in Brazil’s entertainment industry, is the ideal setting to launch this new model,” Luciana Galastri, head of entertainment partnerships at TikTok in Latin America, told Variety. Barbosa stressed the strong presence at RioMarket 2026 of Asian countries, particularly China, India and South Korea, as well as Russia.
Over the past years, Brazilian companies are increasingly doing more business with players from these countries, while maintaining the traditional interaction with partners in the North and Latin America and Europe, she said. From China, one of the highlights is the lecture of Spike Liu, president of China Year Technology. He will present experiences on the use of AI in content creation and production processes in the audiovisual sector.
RioMarket will profit from the presence of international players in the soft launch of its app, which aims to connect film festivals’ markets around the world. Tentatively named Connecting Screens, the platform is inspired by Cinando, the online networking and business platform for film and audiovisual professionals run by Cannes’ Marché du Film. Connecting Screens will facilitate business meetings and provide info about projects, among many other features, Pedro Souza, president of the Financing Committee of the Audiovisual Industry and Commerce Federation (FICA), told Variety.
The idea is to match sellers and buyers of the audiovisual industry,” Souza said. Ilda Santiago, Rio Fest’s exec director of programing and international projects, stressed the importance of forming a new generation of moviegoers for the festival. RioMarket 2026 will count with the presence of participants of the Generation Program, Rio Fest’s initiative dedicated to the use of films in fostering education for children and teenagers in Rio.
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