The 50th edition of São Paulo International Film Festival (October 15-29) kicks off on Wednesday night (October 14) with James Gray’s Paper Tiger and over the next two weeks will screen 392 films from more than 90 countries.
Opening night celebrations include a screening of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s short South Of Tehran, while producer Paulo Branco will receive the Leon Cakoff Award and is being honoured with a retrospective.
The festival, known as Mostra de São Paulo, will also present Gray with the Leon Cakoff Award at a public screening of Paper Tiger. The US filmmaker designed the festival’s poster and is the subject of a retrospective and will take part in an on-stage conversation with Walter Salles. Separately, the Brazilian Oscar-winner will present work-in-progress episodes from his football documentary series Sócrates Brasileiro in the Series at Mostra section.
Mostra de São Paulo, will screen more than 20 Oscar submissions including Brazil’s Gugu’s World by Allan Deberton, May el-Toukhy’s Venice Golden Lion winner A Woman Unknown representing Denmark, Cristian Mungiu’s Cannes Palmes d’Or winner and Romanian submission Fjord, Sandra Wollner’s German entry Everytime, and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s French entry Minotaur.
Festival favourites and anticipated screenings include Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love, Alex Gibney’s Musk, Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning. Indian director S.S. Rajamouli will collect the Leon Cakoff Award and present his 2022 box office smash R.R.R.
A generous selection of Brazilian features from the festival circuit brings Victor Di Marco and Márcio Picoli’s Venice Queer Lion winner London, Gabe Klinger’s Isabel, Ricardo Alves Jr.’s The French Teacher, I Built A Rocket Imagining Your Arrival from Janaína Marques, and Yellow Cake from Tiago Melo, among others. More than 70 films previously unreleased in São Paulo will screen in Mostra Brasil, divided among Special Presentation and New Directors Competition sections.
The sixth Audiovisual Ideas Meeting industry programme (October 20-13) hosted at new venue Solar Fábio Prado has curated more than 70 screenings, masterclasses, panels, and networking events. The programme opens with the presentation of the first Encontros Award to Olga Rabinovich, the Brazilian philanthropist and founder of filmmaker support initiative Projeto Paradiso.
Speakers include Neon’s acquisitions, production and development head Jeff Deutchman, former Berlinale co-director Mariëtte Rissenbeek, Filmmuseum’s Eleni Tzialli, and Tamara Tatishvili from International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund.
Fiftieth anniversary celebrations include the launch of the platform Acervo, which collates festival history and information on more than 12,000 films; an exhibition about the first half-century; and two book launches. Iranian entrepreneur Ahmad Kiarostami will attend an exhibition of unpublished photographs from his father, the late master Abbas Kiarostami.
Mostra de São Paulo returns with its virtual reality programme, and five shorts from the likes of Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof and Afghanistan’s Shahrbanoo Sadat under the auspices of The Displacement Film Fund, co-founded by Cate Blanchett and backed by Hubert Bals Fund.
The festival will present the Bandeira Paulista Trophy to films in the New Directors Competition. Contenders in this section that receive the most audience votes during the first week are submitted for jury consideration in the best fiction film and best documentary categories. Audiences also select the best foreign film and best Brazilian film.
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