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Editorials | 49th Mostra

In Search of Pearls

Writer and visual artist Valter Hugo Mãe has gifted us the illustration that will define the 49th Mostra. Its sinuous lines spark our imagination and surprise us with luminous spheres. The invitation to create this poster came after we watched “From Nowhere - A Portrait of Valter Hugo Mãe”, by Miguel Gonçalves Mendes, and in consideration of the world premiere of “The Son of a Thousand Men”, by Daniel Rezende, a beautiful coincidence that highlights the affectionate relationship between this multi-talented artist and Brazil. Now, let’s turn to the gems we hope to reveal in this 49th edition.

Mostra kicked off the UK/Brazil Season of Culture with a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic “The Lodger” (1927), accompanied by the Brasil Jazz Sinfônica Orchestra. During the 49th Mostra, 25 British productions and co-productions will be presented, showcasing the diversity of the country’s cinema. The UK/Brazil Season of Culture is also featured at the Audiovisual Ideas Market, through several initiatives and joint missions at both Mostra and the BFI London Film Festival. We hope these will sow the seeds for many co-productions between the two countries.

Martinican filmmaker Euzhan Palcy receives the Humanity Award, with screenings of “Sugar Cane Alley” (1983) — Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, among many other accolades —, “A Dry White Season” (1989), and “Siméon” (1992) representing her work. Throughout her career, she has denounced the legacy of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid, while celebrating the pride and beauty of non-hegemonic cultures. Palcy was the first Black woman to have a film produced by a major Hollywood studio and received an Honorary Oscar in 2023.

In 1995, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi received the Bandeira Paulista Trophy in the New Directors Competition at Mostra for “The White Balloon” (1995), and in 2018, while prohibited from leaving Iran, he was honored with the Leon Cakoff Prize. This year, Panahi returns to São Paulo to personally present “It Was Just an Accident” — winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes — and we will have the joy of awarding him with the Humanity Award in person.

The Humanity Award will also be offered to filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne for their committed and ethical body of work addressing urgent social issues. The Belgian brothers’ latest film, “Young Mothers”, will be screened at this year’s edition.

Visionary American screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufman will be honored with the Leon Cakoff Prize. His short film “How to Shoot a Ghost” will be featured in our opening session, and he will also lead the masterclass inaugurating the V Audiovisual Ideas Market.

Mauricio de Sousa is also a recipient of the Leon Cakoff Prize. The brilliant cartoonist, whose characters have spanned generations and become part of our collective imagination, previously created the poster for the 35th Mostra, and this year illustrates the poster for the 2nd Mostrinha.

As part of this tribute, the 49th Mostra will present the biopic “Mauricio de Sousa – The Movie”, while three other titles based on his beloved characters will be screened at the 2nd Mostrinha. The children’s and youth section opens with “Pilar’s Diary in the Amazon” and extends its reach to 26 Unified Educational Centers (CEUs).

With films that remain inventive and modern amid the complex currents of the 21st century, filmmaker Želimir Žilnik is represented by three works exploring recent Eastern European history: “Early Works” (1969), “Marble Ass” (1995), and his latest, “Eighty Plus”.

As every year, Mostra offers a strong selection of restored films, beginning with the legendary “Queen Kelly” (1929), directed by Erich von Stroheim and starring Gloria Swanson, in a newly reconstructed version.

To mark the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the program features the restored classic “Black Rain” (1989), by Shohei Imamura, alongside “Hibakusha - Wandering Soul” (2025), a short by Joel Yamaji about Hiroshima survivor and peace activist Takashi Morita.

The 49th Mostra offers a broad panorama of world cinema, featuring renowned filmmakers such as Yorgos Lanthimos, Ildikó Enyedi, Alex Cox, Christian Petzold, Radu Jude, Park Chan-wook, Tsai Ming-liang, Gianfranco Rosi, Guillermo del Toro, Noah Baumbach, Richard Linklater, among many others. Highlights include official selections and award winners from the festival circuit, such as Jim Jarmusch’s “Father Mother Sister Brother”, this year’s Golden Lion at Venice, and Mascha Schilinski’s “Sound of Falling”, recipient of the Jury Prize at Cannes, alongside winners from Rotterdam and Locarno. At the same time, the program showcases exciting new discoveries and emerging directors in the New Directors Competition.

One of the meanings of “Sirât”, the opening film of the 49th Mostra, is “a narrow bridge spanning the abyss of Hell and leading to Paradise”. While contemporary life often feels dystopian, cinema can help illuminate reasons, suggest paths, offer solutions. In short, it can help us cross bridges.

For all of this, I thank the Mostra team, our supporters, partners and sponsors for the journey so far.

We hope the 49th Mostra uncovers many pearls, and that together we may navigate calm seas, finding strength and wisdom amid the storms.

Wishing everyone a wonderful Mostra!

Renata de Almeida

Petrobras

Petrobras has a long and consistent history of supporting Brazilian cinema. Through the Petrobras Cultural Program, we have sponsored more than 600 films, from productions and remasterings to documentaries and fiction, features and shorts. We have been present at landmark moments in the history of Brazilian audiovisual culture, including the film that marked the period known as “Retomada”, the rebirth of national cinema in the 1990s. Our presence also extends to film festivals, showcases, and screening circuits, strengthening not only production but also circulation and the encounter between audiences and the rich diversity of Brazilian narratives.

We know that Brazilian cinema offers a powerful way of reflecting on the country. It is an art that transcends generations, regions, and accents. It is capable of reinvention, experimentation, and transformation. Above all, it builds bridges between individual and collective stories. By investing in the sector, we contribute to the development of new perspectives and to the strengthening of a living, breathing audiovisual culture that is attuned to the challenges of our time.

Standing alongside the 49th São Paulo International Film Festival is a continuation of this commitment. Mostra is one of the most important festivals in the country and a key space for dialogue between Brazilian and international productions. With each edition, São Paulo becomes a hub of encounters and provocations, where filmmakers, critics, students, and audiences come together to celebrate cinema in all its plurality. Mostra presents premieres, panels, and discoveries, reaffirming the power of art as a space for listening, exchange, and reflection.

By sponsoring this new edition, we reaffirm our commitment to valuing cultural diversity and supporting Brazilian audiovisual production. We know that culture is a fundamental pillar of the country’s development — and that cinema, with its narrative, emotional, and political power, plays an essential role in this process.

We believe in a Brazil that recognizes itself on screen: one that sees itself, is moved, and transformed by the images and sounds created by its own artists. Supporting initiatives like Mostra means continuing to strengthen our commitment to culture as an instrument of social development, critical thinking, and the expression of Brazilian identity.

Petrobras

Itaú

Itaú Cultural and the São Paulo International Film Festival maintain a long-standing partnership, united by a shared purpose of broadening perspectives and building bridges through audiovisual media, fostering audience development, and connecting Brazilian and international cinema with new generations.

In 2025, the 49th Mostra showcases award-winning productions from Cannes, Berlin, and other major festivals, celebrating the creative power of artists who move across different forms of expression and solidifying its position as one of the country’s leading cinematic events.

Since 2021, Itaú Cultural has offered Itaú Cultural Play, a free streaming platform featuring over 450 titles each month, highlighting authentic and diverse narratives about Brazilian identities. Registration is available at itauculturalplay.com.br.

Audiovisual media is also integrated into other areas of Itaú Cultural’s work, remaining present in programs and initiatives that promote and discuss artistic language, preserve memory, and foster dialogue with new generations. Additional information and film content can be found at itaucultural.org.br.

Itaú Cultural

SESC

Mostra expanded

The work developed by SESC in the cinematic field is guided by two principles: diffusion and education, grounded in a diversity of themes, filmmakers, and formats. Partnerships with film programs and festivals serve an equally dual and strategic role, helping to ensure the continuity of these important events in the country’s cultural calendar while also bringing part of their programming to Sesc units and platforms, reaching even broader audiences.

SESC São Paulo has been a partner of the São Paulo International Film Festival since its inception in 1977. Over this long history of institutional collaboration, Sesc has consistently contributed to Mostra’s mission of disseminating the latest world cinema productions, as well as fostering panels with industry professionals. This enables audiences to engage with these works in an informed way, cultivating a complex relationship with existence and taking full advantage of art’s capacity to unlock the imagination and expand perception.

In this 49th edition of the festival, SESC employs a variety of screening formats aimed at audiences interested in Mostra’s films. At CineSesc, in addition to the highly anticipated program, repeat screenings of selected works are offered during a follow-up week. Similarly, ten SESC units in the state’s countryside will host selected works from this edition the following week. During the festival, some feature films will also be available on Sesc Digital, while short films in virtual reality will be screened at CineSesc.

This demonstrates how fruitful such a partnership can be. Given the diversity and consistency of the film repertoires presented, it multiplies exhibition possibilities. At the same time, it affirms SESC’s commitment to democratizing access to symbolic assets that are essential for understanding the multifaceted contemporary experience, with all its inherent challenges.

Luiz Deoclecio Massaro Galina
Director, SESC São Paulo

Spcine

Spcine, São Paulo’s film and audiovisual company, is proud to support the 49th São Paulo International Film Festival, reaffirming its commitment to audiovisual promotion, audience development, and the strengthening of the sector. Over the past decade, Spcine has established itself as a bridge between the city, its cultural infrastructure, and major events, expanding public access to both national and international cinema.

This year, the partnership with Mostra translates into an extensive program across Circuito Spcine venues: daily screenings at São Paulo Cultural Center (CCSP), Cine Olido, Roberto Santos Library, and Cidade Tiradentes Cultural Center; exhibitions at the CEUs (Unified Educational Centers), bringing Mostra to new territories and audiences; and a special session followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers.

This special program within the public movie theater network is complemented by the 2nd Mostrinha, with screenings dedicated to children and youth, nurturing a new generation of viewers — an effort to which Spcine is especially committed.

The Spcine Play platform also joins the celebration with a new visual identity, offering five films from Mostra’s official selection free of charge for 30 days.

Beyond promotional efforts, Spcine contributes to professional development by supporting the hiring of industry practitioners through the Formação Spcine (Spcine Education) network, enabling them to offer courses, workshops, and masterclasses to peers in the audiovisual sector, further promoting the circulation of knowledge and expertise within Mostra.

The São Paulo International Film Festival is one of the country’s most important cultural events, connecting audiences, artists, and ideas around the transformative power of cinema. Spcine celebrates this legacy and wishes Mostra a long life, continuing to illuminate screens and inspire generations.

Lyara Oliveira
President, Spcine

Projeto Paradiso

A work, whatever its nature, demands time, dedication, persistence, and collective effort. Just like the São Paulo International Film Festival, at Projeto Paradiso we believe that great initiatives are built steadily, with a deep commitment to what is being created.

At the 49th Mostra and the 5th edition of the Audiovisual Ideas Market, we celebrate precisely this sense of continuity. Initiatives launched in previous years continue to unfold and bear fruit in the present. In 2024, alongside the Hubert Bals Fund, we promoted the “Impact Day” with the fund’s director, Tamara Tatishvili. On that occasion, we released a publication on the importance of investing in audiovisual development, which later led to the creation of Hubert Bals Fund+Brazil, an unprecedented fund dedicated exclusively to supporting Brazilian projects. This year, Tamara returns for a panel on international financing alongside the British Film Institute — a conversation that reinforces the value of building lasting bridges.

The same principle applies to the Paradiso Award for the distribution of a Brazilian fiction feature film, presented for the third consecutive year at Mostra’s closing ceremony. In 2024, the winner was “Malu”, the debut by director Pedro Freire, which moved audiences through the unique connection it established during its theatrical release. Year after year, the award reaffirms our commitment to supporting the complete life cycle of a film until it reaches its audiences.

In 2025, we take new steps along this path. We will join a panel dedicated to environmental narratives in Brazilian audiovisual productions, underscoring the urgency and relevance of this debate for the national industry. For the first time, we will also take part in a panel on how philanthropy can generate a positive impact for the sector.

As an art, cinema thrives not only on permanence, but also on collaboration: each work is born from the sum of talents, connections, and efforts renewed with every project. This is another belief that guides Projeto Paradiso and one we see reflected in Mostra and the Audiovisual Ideas Market, events we admire for their consistency, relevance, and capacity for reinvention over time. If today we reap the benefits, it is because we have never walked alone, but always side by side with partners who share our long-term commitment.

Long live Mostra and the Audiovisual Ideas Market!

Josephine Bourgois
Executive Director, Projeto Paradiso

São Paulo Municipal Department of Education

São Paulo Municipal Education Network takes part in the 2nd Mostrinha

One of the main goals of the São Paulo Municipal Department of Education is the holistic development of our students and educators. To achieve this, we embrace the concept of an “Educating City”, which emphasizes democratic participation across the municipality’s diverse territories and regions, collaboration with the many actors involved in producing diverse knowledge and practices, recognition of local wisdom, and access to a wide range of cultural, health, sports, entertainment, and leisure facilities, institutions, and organizations.

From this perspective, the Coordination of Unified Educational Centers (CEUs), through its Culture Division, strengthens its relationship with the São Paulo International Film Festival. Audiovisual media, embedded in our public educational policies, is incorporated into classroom practices as outlined in our City Curriculum — through both “auxiliary” and “core” activities (Marcos Napolitano) — as well as in interdepartmental initiatives (Programa Vocacional, Circuito SPCine) and cross-sectoral projects (Mostra EcoFalante, free screenings in neighborhood cinemas). These efforts seek to enhance learning, foster cultural appreciation, encourage narrative creation, and, above all, cultivate critical and empathetic citizens.

Promoted by Mostra with special care, the 1st edition of Mostrinha featured films from multiple countries aimed at children, youth, and adolescents, welcoming hundreds of students from the Municipal Education Network to its screenings. On that occasion, students experienced short, medium, and feature-length live-action and animated films from around the world. Now, for Mostrinha’s 2nd edition, our collaboration continues as we advance our educational goals through cinema. Beyond ensuring access to screening rooms, we aim to foster holistic learning by encouraging the audience to be open and receptive to individual experiences (Jorge Larrosa), to create their own stories and images from a viewer’s perspective (Jacques Rancière), and to develop an understanding across thematic fields that shape the cinematic experience, including image, time, language, and genre.

So, to continue ensuring the rights to education, culture, entertainment, and access to the city, we hope that in every future edition of Mostrinha, our students and educators will keep occupying São Paulo’s film exhibition spaces, expanding and refining their knowledge, repertoires, stories, and, above all, their imaginations. Now more than ever, it is necessary to keep fictioning, keep fabling (Antonio Candido), and dreaming so that we can build, creatively and reflectively, a more diverse, civic, and vibrant society. As poet Waly Salomão declares in Carlos Nader’s documentary “Permanent Pan-Cinema” (2008): “Enough of this nonsense that the dream is over. Life is a dream. Life is a dream. Life is a dream.”

Júnior Suci
São Paulo Municipal Department of Education
Director, Culture Division

Humanity Award | Euzhan Palcy

The succession of sepia-toned photographs suggests a temporality diluted in the dust of memory. Here and there, faces and bodies emerge. Black is the color that renders visible these figures long erased by history. Aesthetics and politics are inseparable in the images of “Sugar Cane Alley” (1983), the feature that revealed Martinican filmmaker Euzhan Palcy — a Black woman from the margins — at a time when the world of cinema was hardly able to look beyond itself.

The film surprised both audiences and the jury at the Venice Film Festival, which awarded Palcy, then 26, the Silver Lion, the first for a female director and for a black director. Four decades later, “Sugar Cane Alley” continues to resonate with the same power as when it was first released.

At the time, little was known about Euzhan Palcy — or about Martinican cinema, for that matter. In her homeland, however, Palcy had already begun her pioneering career in 1974, at just 17, by producing and directing a mid-length TV film about a hardworking woman on a banana plantation. The character served as a precursor to M’Man Tine, the tender grandmother in “Sugar Cane Alley”.

After a period in France, where she studied arts, literature, and trained in photography at the prestigious Louis Lumière film school, Palcy returned to Martinique. In the short “The Devil’s Workshop” (1982), she rehearsed the form and themes that would flourish in her first feature.

An early example of what we now call decolonial cinema, “Sugar Cane Alley” creates dissonance by giving voice, perspective and history to a people for centuries reduced to mere labor.

Palcy’s script, adapted from Joseph Zobel’s semi-autobiographical novel, follows the childhood of José, one of the children of Sugar Cane Alley, a place that symbolizes countless others around the globe, where the excluded are pushed to margins. When the adults leave for grueling work in the sugarcane fields, the children seize a fleeting taste of something they will soon lose: freedom.

Palcy builds the narrative around this idea, knowing it to be utopian. There is always an adult, a boss, a white person, a teacher, or death itself lurking to punish, coerce, or strip away what the children believe is theirs. Along the way, José becomes aware that he is one of the Earth’s “damned”, and fights for the emancipation that those before him never reached.

The film’s impact catapulted Palcy’s career, and she used her visibility to confront the abhorrent system of Apartheid in South Africa, a late bastion of colonial domination. With “A Dry White Season” (1989), she entered the lineage of political cinema grounded in emotional engagement, following in the footsteps of masters such as Costa-Gavras and Gillo Pontecorvo.

The first Hollywood studio production ever directed by a Black woman, this searing thriller starred two politically committed actors, Donald Sutherland and Susan Sarandon. The legendary Marlon Brando came out of retirement for a brief but powerful role that earned him his eighth and final Oscar nomination.

Released five years before the fall of Apartheid, the film became part of the decisive wave of international pressure that helped bring the segregationist regime to an end.

To avoid being swallowed up or stripped of her identity by the Hollywood machine, Palcy returned to her roots with “Siméon” (1992). Bathed in Antillean colors and rhythms, the film affirms identities while playfully engaging with the musical genre, anticipating what the 21st century would later call “soft power.”

She then reaffirmed her commitment to the politics of affect in the documentary series “Aimé Césaire: A Voice for History” (1995), about the Antillean poet who also believed in the arts as a tool against injustice. In another documentary, “The Journey of the Dissidents” (2006), she retraces the efforts of young Martinicans who resisted Marshal Pétain’s puppet government during France’s Nazi occupation.

Palcy’s concise filmography only heightens the coherence of her trajectory, always attuned to the continuities between a slaveholding, colonial past and a present still marked by exploitation and domination.

In 2023, she received an Honorary Academy Award, recognized as “a masterful filmmaker who broke ground for Black women directors and inspired storytellers of all kinds across the globe.”

At its 49th edition, the São Paulo International Film Festival honors Euzhan Palcy with the Humanity Award, recognizing her pivotal role in shaping a counter-hegemonic discourse that continues to inspire countless filmmakers, while offering audiences the chance to rediscover a body of work that remains more relevant than ever.

Humanity Award | Jafar Panahi

The São Paulo International Film Festival has followed Jafar Panahi’s cinema since 1995, when its 19th edition screened and awarded his first feature, “The White Balloon”. From then on, each new work by the Iranian filmmaker has been presented to Brazilian audiences at the festival. In 2018, Mostra honored Panahi with the Leon Cakoff Prize, though he was prevented from leaving Iran and could not come to Brazil. Now, in 2025, the festival will not only screen his brand-new film, “It Was Just an Accident”, this year’s Palme d’Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival, but will also dedicate the Humanity Award to Panahi.

This 30-year journey has been marked by both triumphs and persecution. In his first five features, from 1995 to 2006, Panahi built a progressively politicized filmography, confronting the Iranian regime. In 2009, he became involved in the opposition’s electoral campaign. The following year, he was sentenced to prison, in a ruling meant to silence his art and voice of protest.

His cinema was the reason invoked by the regime to repress him. And it is precisely this cinema that Panahi refused to abandon, continuing to say what needed to be said.

When we first watched “The White Balloon” in 1995, Panahi introduced himself by filming the candor of children, in the tradition of his master Abbas Kiarostami and so many other Iranian filmmakers. Alongside innocence, however, also emerges the theme of deception: an essential device for escaping the oppressive binds of tyrannical power.

The choice of seemingly mundane titles, a hallmark of Iranian ingenuity, reappears in “The Mirror” (1997). The child’s perspective, the wandering, and the almost documentary portrayal of everyday city life suggest an affiliation with Italian neorealism. Yet the principle of fiction as a mirror of reality is broken when the protagonist announces she no longer wants to act. Together with belief, or innocence, Panahi introduces doubt, or deception, demonstrating how one depends on the other.

The next film marks a bolder, more overtly political step for the filmmaker. To create the most explicit portrait possible of women’s conditions in Iran, Panahi leaves aside the innocence of the child’s gaze and focuses on bodies. The relationship between clothing and what cannot be shown (to the eye) and what must be hidden (from the law) reveals cinema’s fascinating power to play with what we see and what remains unseen.

The centrality of the body becomes even more pronounced in his next two features. In one, the overburdened body of a delivery man, crushed by work and injustice, reaches its limit, blocking our view in the magnificent long take that opens and closes the film. In “Offside” (2006), however, clothing is no longer used to conceal, but to deceive.

The first phase of Panahi’s filmography reveals an increasingly explicit progression of opposition to the regime, exposing forms of exclusion, confinement, and repression that despotism seeks to hide.

His open support for the opposition in the 2009 elections led to his conviction in 2010 on absurd charges, based on the claim that he committed crimes through his films, which were constructed as a game between revealing and concealing.

Sentenced to six years in prison and banned from making films, writing scripts, traveling abroad, or speaking to the media for 20 years, the filmmaker was forced to rethink his projects. Like many artists throughout history who have created works whose richness is proportional to the loss of freedoms, Panahi turned scarcity into abundance.

The lightness of digital equipment, combined with how easily it could be concealed, became a strategy to circumvent his punishment. Under the ironic title “This Is Not a Film” (2011), Panahi and filmmaker Mojtaba Mirtahmasb documented the director’s daily life under house arrest, detailing a film project he was forbidden to make. The footage was smuggled out of Iran and screened at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

That same year, the Berlin International Film Festival invited Panahi to sit on the jury. In response to the Iranian government’s refusal to authorize his participation, the Berlinale organizers left his seat empty, turning his absence into a powerful statement.

In the following years, Panahi’s status as a hostage of the regime did not prevent a prolific output, including films such as “Closed Curtain” (2013), “Taxi” (2015), “3 Faces” (2018), and “No Bears” (2022), all awarded at the world’s major festivals. Today, he is the only filmmaker to have won the Golden Bear in Berlin, the Palme d’Or in Cannes, the Golden Leopard in Locarno, and the Golden Lion in Venice.

Persecution didn’t cease: in 2022 Jafar Panahi was imprisoned once again, and was released in February 2023 after a hunger strike.

When announcing the 2025 Palme d’Or for “It Was Just an Accident”, jury president Juliette Binoche emphasized that the film, like all of Panahi’s work, “is born from a feeling of resistance, of survival, which is absolutely necessary today”.

The 49th São Paulo International Film Festival gives the Humanity Award to Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi for demonstrating how culture and art remain fundamental tools for defending freedom, and for expanding the horizons of audiovisual language as an aesthetic, ethical, and political force.

Humanity Award | Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

The transition from the era of the proletariat to that of the precariat prompted filmmakers to use cinema as a privileged vantage point for observing how societal changes affected ordinary lives. The Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, virtually unknown until the mid-1990s, presented in “The Promise” (1996) a portrait that anticipated the future we were slowly approaching, but also offered a gaze of resistance and compassion toward the world.

Luc came from philosophy, Jean-Pierre from dramatic arts. On one side, ideas; on the other, ways to represent them. The duo’s talents, however, did not develop in isolation.

Experiments by French playwright Armand Gatti with video and improvisation inspired their approach to shooting with a handheld camera, linking performance, space, gesture, and immersion. A careful study of films by directors such as the Polish Krzysztof Kieślowski and the French Maurice Pialat revealed ways of filming that defied conventional rules, capable of conveying intensity and the varied states of the soul without relying on psychological acting.

“The Promise”, however, was far from the Dardennes’ first project. Since 1978, the duo had been developing their craft through a number of documentaries in the tradition of militant cinema. They also made “Falsch” (1987) and “I’m Thinking of You” (1993), two fiction films that, in a way, close the first chapter of the brothers’ career. “The Promise” marks the start of what is considered the Dardennes’ mature phase. From that point on, they would refine the elements of an auteur cinema that is both conceptual and emotionally resonant.

The story of the Belgian boy who, through twisted paths, comes to recognize a fellow human being in an undocumented African immigrant demonstrates, as critic Emmanuel Burdeau noted in Cahiers du Cinéma, the primacy of cinema over the written script. “Everything is first subjected to the test of cinema, of presence and raw duration”, he wrote, an impression other critics have described in less precise terms such as “naturalism” and “realism”.

“Rosetta” (1999), their next feature, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The shock produced by the film, amplified by Émilie Dequenne’s performance, confirmed that the Dardennes offered more than just cinema with a strong thematic focus. “Rosetta” demonstrates, once again, that form is content. The loose camera, following bodies and faces closely, creates a sense of veracity. But more than that: it positions us in a dual role, both witnesses and participants. We do not simply observe; we are implicated.

In this way, the Dardennes practice an aesthetics that is also ethical. Rather than merely observing Rosetta’s drama, we become her, for she embodies the billions of individuals left to their own devices in a world where the law of “every person for themselves” applies to all.

Through their mise-en-scène, the Dardennes immerse us in the experience of abandonment, exploring situations in which characters discover that the social and communal fabric is fractured and constantly in crisis. On our side of the screen, we are confronted with what the world often treats as invisible.

The boy in “The Son” (2002), the parents in “The Child” (2005), the protagonists of “Lorna’s Silence” (2008) and “The Kid with a Bike” (2011), the factory worker Sandra in “Two Days, One Night” (2014), the doctor in “The Unknown Girl” (2016), the titular “Young Ahmed” (2019), the exiles of “Tori and Lokita” (2022), and now the teenage girls burdened with early pregnancy in “Young Mothers” (2025) — all embody this abandonment. Yet, in the ethical cinema of the Dardennes, these characters repeatedly encounter unexpected forms of care and support in the face of neglect, signaled both by the directors’ gaze and by the relationships and dynamics with others, where humanity and companionship endure.

The 49th São Paulo International Film Festival celebrates the work of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne with the Humanity Award, honoring the Belgian brothers’ dedication to exposing what society often tries to ignore, and above all, to a cinema that cares about people and the ways their actions resist.

Leon Cakoff Prize | Mauricio de Sousa

Who didn’t lealn to love leading with Monica’s Gang comics, thlow the filst bunny!

Just look at the 28 characters on the poster for the 2nd Mostrinha. Each and every one of them taught us to love reading, having represented us since childhood, through youth, and into adulthood. Each can be recognized by their habits, clothes, hairstyles, and quirks. All of them inherit the unmistakable lines of their father’s hand: Mauricio de Sousa.

This isn’t the first time, however, that Mostra has had the pleasure of welcoming de Sousa’s art. In 2011, the cartoonist designed the official poster for the festival’s 35th edition. In that illustration, Pitheco casts his shadow on a cave wall, centuries before the inventors of the magic lantern popularized the optical toy that would become a precursor to cinema.

But that’s not the only thing de Sousa and Mostra have in common. Through his drawings and stories, the artist created a distinctly Brazilian imaginary for children of all ages. Mostra, in turn, has always offered Brazilian audiences a cinematic culture shaped by many Brazils, and many worlds. These two long-lived and fertile projects share a conviction: the distance between the local and the universal is minimal.

The characters on Mostrinha’s poster are pure de Sousa: always in motion. In the front row are the first-borns, Blu and Franklin. Nobody knew they were blue and blonde when they first appeared in newspaper Folha da Manhã in 1959, as it was printed in black and white then, just like early films.

A few years later came Jimmy Five and his dog Fluff, followed by Smudge, Chuck Billy, Pitheco, Horacio, Jeremiah, Bubbly, and Thunder. Then came Monica and Maggy, both inspired by his first daughters. These two characters, in fact, appeared at a time when women were moving beyond the roles of mothers and wives to become protagonists in their own right. Today, it’s easy to see that Monica’s strength, her ability to make the boys run, anticipates, decades in advance, what we now call “empowerment”.

The leap from paper to screen came at the end of the 1960s with Thunder, who became the face of commercials broadcast on TV.

In the following decade, the gang received its own TV series, “Monica and Friends”. In 1979, “Monica and Jimmy Five: In the World of Romeo & Juliet”, the team’s first animated film, launched a branch of storytelling that continues to flourish to this day. This year, as part of the present tribute, the 2nd Mostrinha will screen three recent productions featuring these beloved characters: “Monica and Friends: Bonds” (2019), “Monica and Friends: Lessons” (2021), and “Chuck Billy and the Marvelous Guava Tree” (2024).

From Blu’s first steps over 60 years ago to the folds of the Monicaverso, Mauricio de Sousa has consistently demonstrated a gift for adapting his stories to changing times. From the Brazil that was one big Lemon Tree District to today’s hyper-modern country where everything has changed, including childhood, his characters never fail to capture who we are.

The screening of the biopic “Mauricio de Sousa - The Movie” traces the artist’s origins, the start of his career, and the creation of the characters who became part of our collective imagination.

By awarding the Leon Cakoff Prize to the multi-talented Mauricio de Sousa, the 49th Mostra celebrates a body of work that is quintessentially Brazilian: mutable, enduring, open, and full of affection.

Leon Cakoff Prize | Charlie Kaufman

1999 was anticipated as an apocalyptic year. The twilight aura of the century’s end fueled assessments that declared the exhaustion of both technology and civilization itself. Amidst this crisis, however, minds unfazed by this supposed depletion emerged, breathing fresh oxygen back into life. Charlie Kaufman soon established himself as a guiding light for the new generation.

“Being John Malkovich” (1999), the screenwriter’s first feature, embodied the ambition of modern cinema with a fragmented structure and fractured characters. Kaufman leaned into cerebral humor, provoking nervous laughter laced with reflection.

Beyond its intricate narrative aimed at audiences starved for complexity, the film carved out a place in the sun for anomalous characters. Indie cinema, an important niche in the 1990s, offered countless portrayals of young adults in crisis. Kaufman’s early screenplays reflected this sense of incapacity so common in a world obsessed with competence. More importantly, they focused on the inner lives of characters, emphasizing the idea that “up close, no one is normal”, at a time when flawless performance had become a social imperative.

His first screenplay for the big screen was no rookie work. Since the early 1990s, Kaufman had been immersed in writers’ rooms, the true factories of television series. In those multi- creative environments, TV often managed to be the medium that best satisfied the demand for complex narratives and multidimensional characters.

His collaborations on his first two features with Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, directors of overflowing imagination, also worked in his favor. No one expected Jonze or Gondry to make conventional films, as both had entered the world of cinema as inventive artists, a status they earned through the creation of hugely successful music videos.

The singularity of Kaufman’s stories also drew attention to screenwriters as auteurs in their own right. Long overshadowed by the prominence of directors, screenwriters were rarely highlighted as selling points in production marketing. It is no coincidence that figures such as Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges, Federico Fellini, Joel and Ethan Coen, and Agnès Jaoui only gained wider public recognition after becoming directors themselves.

“Human Nature” (2001), “Adaptation” (2002), “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” (2002), and especially “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, all came to be known as “Charlie Kaufman films”, even though he didn’t actually direct any of them. In other words, it is possible to recognize recurring themes, methods, and stylistic traits in films “by” Kaufman.

Nourished by high literature and theater, Kaufman knew how to translate into cinema, through a playful lens, questions that occupy theorists, such as metanarratives, reflexivity, and timeless inquiries into what we call “reality”.

“Synecdoche, New York” (2008), his directorial debut, made clear even in the title that, for Kaufman, thinking is a form of great entertainment. The film confirmed his talent for creating hybrids between the experimental and the mainstream: pop objects capable of sparking academic debate, theoretical films that reached beyond the bubble of art-house audiences.

Success could have easily turned into formula, but Kaufman’s restless mind always pulls him off the beaten path. With “Anomalisa” (2015), part of the present tribute by Mostra, he experimented with animation to explore the fluid boundaries of realism, unstable subjectivity, and the struggles of adulthood, once again reaffirming his solidarity with the fragile beings hidden within us.

“I’m Thinking of Ending Things” (2020) showed that there’s no point in self-blame, in staring into the mirror and calling yourself useless. It’s not just the self that is fractured: the world itself is a shattered glass we try, in vain, not to step on.

The 49th São Paulo International Film Festival dedicates the Leon Cakoff Prize to Charlie Kaufman for his enduring and ongoing contributions to an art form that never ceases to be reborn. As part of this tribute, the festival will also host the first Brazilian screening of the short film “How to Shoot a Ghost”, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival. In this sensorial journey through the streets of Athens, Kaufman hunts his (and our) favorite ghosts: memory, identities, desires, and cinema itself.

Special Screening | Želimir Žilnik

Želimir Žilnik remains a somewhat hidden figure in cinema, despite a filmography spanning seven decades, more than 50 titles, and a continuing string of awards at prestigious festivals. The filmmaker’s work, often overlooked, is not only historically significant: it was already forward-looking when he first began, 60 years ago, and remains inventive and modern amid the complex currents of the 21st century.

The 49th Mostra presents three films from the Serbian director’s oeuvre: “Early Works” (1969), his debut feature, winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival; “Marble Ass” (1995), which received a Teddy Award, also at the Berlinale; and the very recent “Eighty Plus”, screened at this year’s edition of the German festival.

Žilnik’s filmography serves as a seismograph of history. He was born in 1942 in a Nazi concentration camp in Niš, then part of the Yugoslav Republic. His parents, communist resistence fighters, were killed in the war. He was then raised by his grandparents. Žilnik grew up under the socialist regime of Josip Broz Tito, the prime minister who would become lifelong president of Yugoslavia. The young republic balanced internal ethnic tensions with different pressures: on one side, the hegemonic Soviet communism in Eastern Europe; on the other, capitalism with its promises of wealth and consumption.

After studying law, Žilnik defined the focus of his work with four short films that depicted unemployed workers, abandoned children, political dissatisfaction among youth, and protests against the regime.

In 1968, the “year that never ended”, he made his first feature, ironically titled “Early Works”. By mid-1969, the film was awarded the Golden Bear, the Berlinale’s highest prize.

The “early works” referenced in the title allude to Karl Marx’s texts, in which the German thinker outlined the structural conditions necessary for the advent of communism. These conditions, however, did not suit agrarian nations with only rudimentary industrialization, as was the case with Yugoslavia.

The film explores this dissonance in the form of a road movie. Four young people, led by a girl named Yugoslava, wander through villages, ruins, and arid landscapes, spreading socialist ideals as utopian visions.

In the opening scenes, the film labels itself a comedy and credits additional dialogue to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Its farcical tone softens the risk of punishment, which was recurrent under the repressive regimes of the time. Žilnik and his colleagues in the so-called Black Wave of 1960s Yugoslav cinema were well aware of what had unfolded in Hungary in 1956 and Prague in 1968.

The film’s strategy is neither to confront through ridicule nor to resort to anti-communist discourse. Instead, its young protagonists embody the ideals of the first generation born under the promises of socialism, now disillusioned with the regime’s results.

Still, “Early Works” doesn’t fall into the “thesis film” category. From this first feature, Žilnik established a principle that would guide his entire career: content and form are inseparable. The characters’ disruptive, often anarchic — some might even say “punk” — trajectories unfold through fragments and narrative clashes that defy linearity and totalization.

“Marble Ass”, made three decades later, shows once again that a politically engaged aesthetic cannot be rigid or formulaic. Set during the Bosnian War, Žilnik follows the clandestine, unconventional daily lives of Merlyn and Sanela, two queer characters. While Slobodan Milošević’s Serbian government exterminated ethnic minorities in a fractured Yugoslavia, the two respond with a disruptive “make love, not war”. As young soldiers return traumatized from the front, the arms of Merlyn and Sanela become a powerful weapon for peace.

Shot on a shoestring budget using pre-digital video technology, “Marble Ass”, screened at the 19th Mostra, portrays social malaise in Belgrade, marked by precarious living conditions and violence against marginalized characters. Before it became a trend, Žilnik blurred the lines between documentary and fiction, crafting a film as unconventional as its characters. The feature earned him a Teddy Award in Berlin, granted to works with LGBTQIA+ themes.

Thirty years later, Žilnik arrives at the present as vigorous as ever, attentive to new forms of exclusion and resistance. “Eighty Plus” explores the experiences of those who have long walked this earth, in a society where the elderly are often seen as a burden. The film follows Stevan, an octogenarian pianist, returning to Serbia and revisiting his youth.

This journey back to his origins carries more irony than nostalgia. By evoking a time that no longer exists, Žilnik casts past catastrophes in a new light, without repeating the belief that all hope is lost.