As São Paulo-based growth and coaching hub BrLab gears up for its fifteenth anniversary version in 2026, certainly one of Latin America’s most influential undertaking labs has opened submissions and unveiled a raft of adjustments designed to develop its attain, deepen its help for rising expertise and push sustainability up the regional agenda.
The fifteenth BrLab will run April 7-14, primarily in São Paulo, with satellite tv for pc actions in Brasilia and Recife. Producers, administrators and writers from throughout Latin America, Spain and Portugal will convene for every week of labs, market encounters and open-industry programming.
Functions for its 4 2026 workshops – BrLab Options, BrLab Tough Minimize, BrLab Viewers Design and the brand new BrLab Youngsters – are free and open from Nov. 12 to Dec. 12, 2025 by way of the lab’s web site.
“For us, each version is a chance to establish what’s being imagined throughout the area,” says BrLab founder, director and curator Rafael Sampaio. “The {industry} trusts us with new concepts yr after yr.”
Based in 2011 and arranged by Klaxon Cultura Audiovisual, BrLab has grown from a small workshop for Latin American options right into a compact however influential platform, extra coaching hub than full-blown market, but firmly embedded within the regional calendar for tasks seeking to sharpen their inventive and monetary methods.
Supported by establishments such because the Ibermedia program, Projeto Paradiso and Spcine – and now Petrobras as a multi-year sponsor – BrLab receives greater than 400 submissions yearly, curated by an expert choice committee.
As of 2025, 62 options that handed by way of its numerous sections have been produced and launched, 17 extra are in post-production and one other 10 are financed for manufacturing by way of 2026. By subsequent yr the tally of accomplished movies linked to the lab is predicted to method 90.
Many have premiered at top-tier festivals, together with Cannes, Venice, Berlin, San Sebastián, Locarno, Sundance and Toronto. Latest standouts embody “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo,” which gained the highest prize at Cannes’ Un Sure Regard; “Levante” (Cannes Critics’ Week 2023); “Légua,” which screened at Cannes’ Administrators’ Fortnight; Sundance title “Los Tiburones”; Berlinale competitors multi-prize winner “Las Heiresses”; and San Sebastián Golden Shell laureate “Los Reyes del Mundo.” “The Wolf Behind the Door,” chosen in BrLab’s very first version in 2011, later bowed at Toronto and San Sebastián, saying a brand new expertise to trace in Fernando Coimbra.
Avoiding the Crowded Fall Pageant Hall
Beginning with this fifteenth version, BrLab has completely shifted from its conventional October slot to early April. The transfer is designed to keep away from the crowded fall pageant hall and provides tasks extra time to shine scripts and cuts earlier than premiering within the again half of the yr.
“This variation creates a extra helpful rhythm for undertaking growth,” Sampaio says. “We would like our chosen groups to take full benefit of the worldwide circuit, and April positions them nicely to do this – particularly for the Tough Minimize Lab.”
In 2021, BrLab launched BrLab CoPro, a curated boutique co-production discussion board geared toward galvanizing new partnerships with Brazil and different Latin American territories. The discussion board invitations producers, funds, gross sales brokers and broadcasters seeking to construction cross-border packages at a time when co-production has turn out to be important for financing and circulation.
This platform is deepening BrLab’s position as a connector not solely of expertise however of the institutional and industrial gamers that may truly get movies made.
Flagship Labs and Viewers Design
This system’s spine stays BrLab Options, centered on fiction options from Latin America plus Spain and Portugal. 12 tasks will obtain mentorship on script, path, manufacturing and distribution from a roster of regional heavyweights. Longtime backer Programa Ibermedia, a companion because the first version, will as soon as once more supply participation grants to chose groups.
Working in parallel, BrLab Tough Minimize caters to fiction and documentary options within the enhancing stage from throughout the Ibero-American world, pairing every undertaking with an enhancing tutor and a small group of friends to assist fine-tune the minimize and place the movie for festivals, gross sales and distribution.
After an preliminary section centered on Brazil, BrLab’s Viewers Design program returns with a broader remit, now open to the entire of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. Impressed by methodologies Sampaio first encountered at TorinoFilmLab, the workshop helps groups assume strategically about audiences from growth onwards, mapping core and secondary viewers and plotting launch paths that may mix festivals, theaters, platforms and various circuits.
“In Brazil everybody talks about ‘creating new audiences,’ however for years folks have turn out to be disconnected from our personal cinema — they’re merely not educated to see themselves on display,” Sampaio defined. “That’s why we’d like areas like BrLab, the place Latin American narratives and histories may be developed and guarded, whilst we maintain one eye in the marketplace, as a result of being represented on display is a proper.”
Youngsters Lab in Recife
The largest new innovation now introduced for 2026 is BrLab Youngsters, a brand new workshop devoted to movie and sequence tasks for youngsters and younger audiences, which is able to unspool in Recife. The initiative responds to what Sampaio sees as a power lack of particular public coverage and institutional help for youths content material in Brazil and far of Latin America.
“If youngsters don’t develop up watching Latin American tales, they gained’t really feel related to our historical past and our cinema once they turn out to be adults,” he argued.
Tasks chosen for BrLab Youngsters will obtain tutorship from writers specialised in younger audiences, together with Janaína Tokitaka and Gabriella Mancini, alongside pedagogical consultants. Recife-based producer Nara Aragão will oversee manufacturing mentoring.
For Sampaio, the youngsters strand is carefully linked to the audience-design push, providing an area to deal with the challenges of household titles competing with U.S. studio fare whereas attempting to construct a loyal native viewers for regional tales.
Inexperienced Initiative With Petrobras
Backed for the primary time by Petrobras as presenting companion and lead sponsor, BrLab’s fifteenth version may also launch a sustainability push. Curated by pioneering green-production specialist Ariane Ferreira, the lab has assembled Suppose Tank BrLab Petrobras, along with Cinema Verde Pageant, an initiative to adapt rising worldwide eco-standards to Latin American realities and to encourage native establishments to combine environmental standards into movie funding.
Sampaio factors to new European stories and incentive schemes round greener movie and TV manufacturing as a reference, however stresses that Latin America is ranging from a unique baseline. The goal, he says, is to convene the {industry} round sensible steps that may be progressively adopted within the area.
“In lots of circumstances, the one actual inexperienced practices in our area are taking place on large worldwide streamer exhibits that arrive with their very own protocols,” he says. “If we are able to pilot concepts within the audiovisual sector, that may additionally encourage adjustments in different elements of society.”
Co-Manufacturing Hub in a Rebounding Brazil
BrLab’s fifteenth version comes as Brazilian cinema experiences renewed momentum. After years of funding paralysis, minority co-production schemes have been revived and Brazil is as soon as once more quick consolidating as a sought-after companion on main Latin American tasks, usually together with European finance.
“In the present day, international tasks can come to BrLab to search out Brazilian minority co-producers,” Sampaio notes. “After we launched, Ibermedia was virtually the one co-production avenue. Now there are a number of funds, and the lab has turn out to be a pure assembly level.”
Viewers design session at BrLab 2019
Bella Tozini
