Rio2C 2026 Highlights Top Brazilian Creative Industry Talents

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — Rio2C’s wide-ranging 2026 program is set to feature top Brazilian creative industry speakers, such as helmers Wagner de Assis, Esmir Filho and Carlos Saldanha, journalist and writer Caco Barcellos, writer Thalita Rebouças, doc maker Ricardo Calil and comedian João Vicente de Castro.

This year’s Rio2C will take place May 26-31 at Rio de Janeiro’s Cidade de Artes, with the conference featuring some 2,000 speakers talking on panels or giving keynotes addressing the hot-button topics faced by creative industries.  

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Director, producer and screenwriter Wagner de Assis, founder of production company Cinética, will speak at the session Faith Moves Mountains and Engages Audiences. Panelists will discuss local productions with religious and spiritual themes.

Assis has helmed 10 features, most of them about Spiritism, in particularly Kardecist Spiritism. Allan Kardec codified his doctrine in 19th-century France but Brazil traditionally has the largest number of Kardecist Spiritism followers and sympathizers in the world.

Assis’ features have a captive, niche audience, and some have made it to the mainstream. Fox’s 2010 released “Nosso Lar” (“Astral City: A Spiritual Journey”) was a local blockbuster, selling over 4 million tickets. “Nosso Lar 2: Os Mensageiros,” released in 2024 by Disney’s Star, also found strong box office traction with a total admission of 1.6 million tickets.

“Rio2C has already shown the power it has to bring people together and to discuss relevant topics. I’m very happy that the theme of spirituality connected to cinema is present this year,” Assis told Variety.

The helmer is working on three new features. Disney is due to release “Nosso Lar 3: Vida Eterna,” starring Carol Castro and Fabio Assunção, in Jan. 2027. As in the previous features of the Nosso Lar franchise, the new pic is based on a book psychographed by the notorious Brazilian spiritist medium Chico Xavier (1910-2002), under the influence of the spirit of André Luiz, Xavier said.

Assis lensed in New Jersey and Connecticut “The Fox Sisters,” an English-language biopic of the 19^th-century pioneers of Spiritism in the U.S. The feature has premiered at festivals and is due to open in Brazil this year, he added.

He has also lensed “Emmanuel,” a biopic of Chico Xavier’s spiritual guide. Local distributor Imagem is due to release the film in Brazil in the second half of 2027, Assis said.

“I like the broad scope of Rio2C, which encourages the coexistence not only of cinema, but also of technology, as well as fields such as music, science, and many others,” stressed Assis. “It’s really nice to walk around the venue and see people with so many different artistic and professional backgrounds.”

The interface of film and music is key to the creative process of Esmir Filho, a director-producer-screenwriter. He wrote and helmed “Homem com H,” the 2025 biopic of local star singer Ney Matogrosso. Critics acclaimed the Paris Filmes-produced and distributed pic that sold 643,013 tickets, ranking sixth among local films last year.

Filho’s debut pic, “Os Famosos e os Duendes da Morte,” is about a teenager, Mr. Tambourine, who lives in a small town in Southern Brazil and dreams of attending a Bob Dylan show.

“I’m passionate about music. For me, sound does not come afterward. It is part of the construction while I’m writing the story. So, I do not separate cinema from music. I believe cinema is music,” Filho told Variety. “In my projects, I always create playlists before I start writing. While I’m working on the screenplay, I’m already worried about acquiring the rights to the songs.”

Filho’s most recent production is “Atenção para o Refrão,” a docuseries about iconic Brazilian song refrains. His sister, Sarah Oliveira, hosts the series, which has opened on pay-TV channel Bis and streaming service Globoplay.

The helmer is now working on feature-length doc “Ney por trás das máscaras,” that follows Matogrosso at the grand parade of the Rio de Janeiro Carnival in 2026. The singer was honored as the theme of the renowned samba school Imperatriz Leopoldinense parade.

His next production is a film for Netflix, and a key one at that, “The Stranger in Bed” (“Uma Estranha na Cama”) based on a Raphael Montes novel, which Filho labels as offering erotic suspense in a tropicalized version of classic films of Brian de Palma and Adrian Lyne.

Carlos Saldanha, director of animated features “Ice Age: The Meltdown,” “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs,” “Rio,” “Rio 2,” “Ferdinand” and “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” will talk with Amyr Klink, the local explorer who circumnavigated the Antarctic continent, for a conversation about the “personal ocean” as a metaphor for a journey.

The panel How to Create for Distracted Minds will discuss the impacts of multi-screen consumption on narrative construction. It will bring together Thalita Rebouças, writer of best-selling novels targeting teenagers, screenwriter Raul Perez and creator Pedro Ivo. Journalist Genesson Honorato will moderate the panel that will reflect on rhythm, language and engagement in a context of fiercely contested attention.

Actor and director Heloísa Périssé will join screenwriter Renata Sofia and director Anita Barbosa on the panel Love Is in the Air: the New Romantic Comedy, a genre on the rise driven by streaming and box-office successes.

Rio2C 2026 also hosts the panel Audiovisual in Extreme Situations, featuring Sylvestre Campe and Gustavo Gama, director and producer of the docu-series “The Arctic Labyrinth,” and Karina Oliani, co-founder of Pitaya Filmes, to discuss the experiences and strategies adopted by filmmakers who face logistical, climatic and human challenges, in order to capture powerful stories far from urban centers.

Complementing this perspective, vet investigative reporter, writer and doc maker Caco Barcellos will lecture about storytelling and journalistic responsibility. Barcellos has investigated police violence, organized crime and human rights violations in Brazil and has recently covered the Iranian War.

“I will talk about my 50 years of exclusively street reporting, always pursuing two interconnected themes: violence and social and economic injustice,” Barcellos told Variety.

Barcellos’ book “Rota 66,” published in 1993 and winner of the Jabuti Prize in the reporting category, was adapted into fiction series “Rota 66: A Polícia que Mata” (“Rota 66: The Killer Unit”), released in Sept. 2022 on local streamer Globoplay.

Published in 2003, “Abusado,” another Jabuti Prize winner, is an investigative nonfiction-reporting book that tells the story of Márcio Amaro de Oliveira, the drug dealer lord who ruled the Santa Marta favela in Rio de Janeiro.

“‘Abusado’ will also become a series. The book is a nonfiction novel that avoids Manichaeism. There are no clear heroes or villains. Everyone is portrayed as a human being simultaneously exposed to the external laws of survival and to the constant risks of shootouts, cinematic escapes and murders,” he said.

“In what may be the most controversial episode of the series, we will show how the ‘Abusado’ [Oliveira] managed to convince pop star Michael Jackson and film director Spike Lee to shoot the music video ‘They Don’t Care About Us’ in the heart of the favela, an event that made Dona Marta known worldwide. ‘Abusado’ personally took responsibility for Jackson’s safety and for that of all the musicians, models, and dancers in his team,” added Barcellos.

The panel The Impact of Live Content on Audience and Business will bring together Mônica Pimentel, Warner Bros. Discovery’s VP of content and head of talent, Gabriel Volfzon, Globo’s channel director, and Douglas Rodrigues, YouTube Brasil’s strategic partner manager, to analyze the relevance of live content and its monetization strategies.

In the Writer’s Room section of Rio2C 2026, the program features discussions that explore different ways into audiovisual creation, from adapting real stories to building narratives based on investigative journalism. Documentary maker Ricardo Calil (co-director of “Eu Sou Carlos Imperial”), Cássia Dian and Nátara Ney will debate at the panel Is This Story Worth a Documentary? the criteria that guide the choice between documentary, series or feature film for productions based on true stories.

The dialogue between reality and narrative is the topic of Investigative Journalism at the Origin of Great Stories, a panel that will feature Daniela Arbex, Malu Gaspar, Fábio Gusmão and Rodolfo Schneider, who will discuss how investigations are transformed into content for film and series.

In the panel How a Writers’ Room Works by Porta dos Fundos, comedian João Vicente and Daniel Belmonte will talk about production company Porta dos Fundos’ creative process, detailing brainstorming to character building and the development of narratives for short videos.