Lula's winning the second round at the polls against the far-right Flávio Bolsonaro is the industry's only chance at a thriving future. RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil – Inside one of the refrigerated rooms of the Armazém da Utopia, the beautiful portside warehouse where the Rio Film Festival’s RioMarket takes place, renowned director Marcelo Gomes lifts his hand and makes an “L” sign. The room bursts into applause.
Gomes had been sitting for over an hour alongside “The Blue Trail” actor Rodrigo Santoro and Rio Film Festival director Ilda Santiago by the time the upcoming presidential elections came up. It was Friday morning, two days before the polls were due to open, and the room had flooded with people sporting Lula stickers attached to their T-shirts, the bright shades of red popping against the dark grey of the walls. That is because Lula, Brazil’s current president and campaigning candidate, had been parading the centre of Rio just a few hundred meters away from the port.
As the hundreds of thousands of people made their way down the narrow roads following the politician, a few rerouted into the industry event, still carrying big flags and with faces lit up with hope. Brazil, one of the greatest cinema nations in the world, has reaffirmed its international reach and success in grand fashion in the last two years: Walter Salles’ “I’m Still Here” won the country its first Oscar in 2025, with Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent” bringing Brazil back to the glitzy awards earlier this year after picking up two prizes at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. The sentiment has been palpable in festivals and markets around the world: Brazil is on the up and up.
It is the country to bet on. But this success, of course, has not happened in a miraculous silo. Brazil’s renewed industry is the product of Lula’s public policies.
The president is perhaps the most culture-and arts-focused in the history of the country, having hosted regular screenings of Brazilian films at the presidential residency in Brasília and investing heavily in the country’s film sector following four years of a Jair Bolsonaro government that almost immediately did nothing to counteract a court judgement’s stripping away of near all public support for cinema. Bolsonaro’s presidency was confirmed mere months before Mendonça Filho’s “Bacurau” and Karim Aïnouz’s “The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão” both picked up awards at the Cannes Film Festival, a moment that could have pushed the country’s cinema to a rise similar to the one we have seen in the last two years. The government that came soon after brought it all to a screeching, heavily consequential halt.
Soon after taking over the presidency, Bolsonaro cut the budgets for the National Cinema Agency (ANCINE) and the Audiovisual Sector Fund (FSA) by nearly 43%. Before the COVID-19 pandemic that further accentuated the sectorial crisis, the Bolsonaro government was behind an 18-month freeze of public funds for the national agency. Conversely, once Lula was reelected in 2022, he pledged an investment of R$1.6 billion ($298 million) to support the national production of film and television, with federal funding targeting local audiovisual production to boost both the domestic and international markets.
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