Festival do Rio 2026: Mirrors and Windows at the Edge of the Abyss
The guiding principle behind film festivals is the exhibition of a wide variety of perspectives, contexts and storytelling methods. Together, the films can compose a mosaic of the present and a partial snapshot of the state of world cinema. Festival do Rio usually takes place during the first two weeks of October, meaning that every four years, it coincides with national and state elections that determine Brazil’s congressional representatives, governors and, of course, president.
My perception of the titles I saw at the 2026 edition was inevitably influenced by that overlap, and by the political discussions taking place in Brazil and elsewhere. Cinema-going may offer a temporary distraction from the pessimism inspired by the rising tide of conservatism, including its familiar crusade against the arts, but the world inevitably follows us into the theater.
The films that stood out became both mirrors of the current climate and windows onto other places and historical moments, revealing connections that range from foreign political interference and the foundations of the post-truth age to artistic defiance in the face of oppression. Finding those connections was as unsettling as it was stimulating, and a reminder of why events like Festival do Rio continue to matter.
Wild Horse Nine
Dir. Martin McDonagh
In Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, a pair of CIA operatives, played by John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, are embroiled in a political scheme in the backdrop of 1970s Latin America. Just months before Chilean president Salvador Allende’s death during a U.S.-backed coup, a getaway to remote Easter Island unfolds into both a wild matryoshka doll of conspiracies. The result is a somber comedy about mortality, recalling the mixture of criminal intrigue, caustic humor and existential reflection McDonagh previously explored in In Bruges (2008).
McDonagh’s latest is a proper hangout movie that allows situations and relationships to develop at an unhurried pace. The friendship between the two agents is as compelling and complicated as the bonds at the center of McDonagh’s previous work, The Banshees of Inishirin (2022). Although the film clearly condemns the damage these men are inflicting on Chile and the region as a whole, the screenplay’s effectiveness at humanizing them becomes both a feature and a bug.
Outside the theater, there was a familiar sense of powerlessness in watching the United States – through the Trump administration, Meta and God knows who else – interfere more or less openly in another country’s democratic process for the sake of its preferred political faction. McDonagh skillfully juxtaposes the characters’ approaching deaths with the looming period of state-sponsored bloodshed awaiting Chile, peppering the story with characteristically caustic humor. Still, there are limits to how much empathy that a contemporary audience living through this exact context may be willing to extend.
La Bola Negra
Dir. Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo
On election day, as the votes were being counted toward an overwhelming victory for the far right across the executive and legislative branches, I watched La Bola Negra. Directed by Los Javis and selected as Spain’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, it intertwines three stories connected to the Spanish Civil War and its reverberations across generations.
After his village is bombed, a young trumpeter, played by singer-songwriter Guitarricadelafuente, is forced to become a soldier in the fascist army in order to survive. There, he meets a prisoner, a theater actor for whom he develops a secret desire. A Grindr notification announces a jump of almost 80 years: in the present, a historian and former playwright researches songs documenting dissident experiences of gender and sexuality from the early 20th century. He then receives a call concerning papers left behind by a grandfather he never knew. Among them is a play written by a poet during the Spanish Civil War, the creation and performance of which form the film’s third narrative strand.
Although set on a different continent and in a different historical context, the film’s fractured structure, which connects archival research with the survival of stories under an oppressive regime, finds a formal counterpart in last year’s The Secret Agent. The scale and production value of both the wartime storyline and the period play are impressive, even if they occasionally feel inflated by a sense of self-importance and the possibility of an awards campaign.
Yet the cumulative effect remains powerful. In its treatment of queerness, particularly, the film’s expansive final montage insists that it is not only violence and pain that stretch beyond an individual lifetime. Love, kindness and art can do the same. If cinema can preserve the memory of persecution, La Bola Negra argues that it can also preserve the gestures of solidarity that kept people alive.
Funk
Dir. Aly Muritiba
If La Bola Negra looks into the past to recover lives that an authoritarian system attempted to erase, Aly Muritiba’s Funk turns toward a cultural phenomenon that remains highly visible while still being treated by much of Brazilian society as something that should be controlled or sanitized.
Duda Santos plays MC Sabrina, a young singer attempting to establish herself in Rio de Janeiro’s funk scene. Her trajectory, from the beginning of her career in Morro dos Prazeres to performances at increasingly prominent parties, is painted in the broad strokes of a familiar backstage narrative: raw talent, early setbacks, sudden opportunities and the pressure that accompanies success. The structure rarely deviates from the established grammar of films about aspiring artists, but the world surrounding that trajectory gives Funk its specificity.
A sizable budget does not always translate into a well-shot or convincing production, especially when filmmakers try to reproduce the energy of nightlife. Here, it does. The party and concert sequences are the film’s most impressive accomplishment, capturing the physical textures of the baile without reducing it to colorful background decoration. The propulsive editing and enveloping soundscape convey how songs are assembled, performed and experienced collectively. At its best, Funk understands that this music cannot be separated from bodies, spaces and communities.
The film is also unusually unwilling to sanitize its subject for respectability. It neither censors the genre’s deliberately provocative lyrics nor ignores the more sensitive realities surrounding the scene, including poverty, organized crime, drugs and the commercialization of sexuality. Some of those subjects could have benefited from a more searching examination, particularly once Sabrina’s rise begins to follow a predictable dramatic route. Still, acknowledging these contradictions without treating them as an indictment of the entire culture is itself significant.
That position inevitably makes the film an easy target for the culture-war outrage routinely directed at funk, an outrage in which aesthetic objections are almost impossible to separate from racism, sexism and class contempt. In the middle of an election defined partly by arguments over who represents the “real” Brazil, Funk offers an obvious answer: the people producing one of the country’s most popular cultures are already part of that reality, whether or not political and cultural gatekeepers find their voices respectable.
Ink
Dir. Danny Boyle
While Funk considers what happens when popular expression moves from the margins toward the mainstream, Danny Boyle’s Ink examines the opposite side of that exchange: the institutions that learn how to turn popular appetite into influence.
Set in England in 1969, the film follows journalist Larry Lamb (played by Jack O’Connell), as he joins Rupert Murdoch (played by Guy Pearce) in transforming The Sun into the tabloid it is today. Lamb assembles a group of misfits and opportunists willing to abandon the conventions of the traditional British press in favor of punchier headlines, sensational stories and a more aggressively populist identity.
Boyle’s rapid-fire editing and hyperstylized filmmaking are particularly well suited to the material. The newsroom becomes a machine whose rhythm grows faster as the staff discovers how effectively provocation can be converted into circulation. The team-building passages unfold almost like a heist film: recruit the right specialists, identify the weaknesses in an established system and execute a plan that everyone else considers impossible.
At first, that structure lends the journalists the appeal of likable underdogs challenging an elitist and stagnant industry. Gradually, however, the reality of what they are building begins to intrude. The thrill of invention gives way to the uncomfortable sensation of watching the serpent’s egg crack open: news transformed into entertainment, outrage refined as a commercial product and reactionary politics cultivated under the guise of giving ordinary people what they want.
For all its visual exuberance, Ink remains recognizably adapted from a play. The dialogue-heavy narrative and limited number of locations sometimes work against Boyle’s attempts to make the material feel expansive. The cast compensates with precise, energetic performances, maintaining the sense that every editorial decision is also a negotiation among egos, ambitions and competing ideas of power.
More troubling is the film’s oddly apologetic treatment of Murdoch. It understands the consequences of the media model being invented, but appears reluctant to connect them too directly to the man financing and benefiting from it. That hesitation becomes especially conspicuous during the final montage, which traces the path from the newsroom’s innovations to the contemporary information ecosystem. The sequence is about as emphatic as filmmaking gets, but its bluntness feels appropriate. In a story about images, headlines and repetition overwhelming public judgment, even the film’s use of artificial intelligence finds a rare conceptual justification.
Seen during an election in which social-media platforms, foreign interests and ideologically aligned outlets all competed to manufacture competing versions of reality, Ink did not feel like a period piece – it felt like an origin story for the machinery still operating around us.
The French Teacher
Dir. Ricardo Alves Jr.
The machinery is less visible but no less insidious in Ricardo Alves Jr.’s The French Teacher. Graça, played by Grace Passô, is a Black lesbian woman living in Belo Horizonte with her French girlfriend, Clara. She supports herself by offering private language lessons, but circumstances force her to move into the home of an evangelical family. What begins as an uncomfortable domestic arrangement gradually takes on the contours of a conspiracy as Graça becomes entangled in the family’s religious world and begins to lose her grasp on reality.
The film makes no attempt to disguise its debt to Rosemary’s Baby (1968). From the invasive concern of apparently well-meaning strangers to the growing suspicion that an entire community may be collaborating in something sinister, Ricardo Alves Jr. borrows many of the earlier film’s most recognizable elements. More importantly, he translates its paranoia into a distinctly Brazilian context, replacing an affluent Manhattan coven with the social and political influence of evangelical fundamentalism.
That adaptation is carried by a moody, controlled directorial approach. Rooms feel simultaneously ordinary and hostile, while seemingly benign conversations acquire the structure of interrogations. Graça’s increasing isolation is not created only through overt threats, but through the accumulation of judgments concerning her independence, her relationship and her unwillingness to submit to an imposed notion of salvation.
Grace Passô, one of Brazil’s finest actresses, gives another superb and intensely physical performance. Even when the narrative begins to lose direction, her work keeps Graça’s fear grounded in something more complicated than generic horror-movie panic. She conveys the exhaustion of a woman who cannot determine whether she is genuinely in danger, being manipulated into doubting herself or simply recognizing a form of violence that everyone around her has agreed to call care.
The film nevertheless hits a wall in its second half. Its atmosphere continues to thicken, but the narrative seems uncertain about where the escalation should lead, and the absence of a decisive conclusion weakens some of the earlier tension. The ambiguity is clearly intentional, yet there is a difference between refusing to solve a mystery and appearing unable to decide what form that mystery should ultimately take.
During the post-screening Q&A, Alves Jr. explained that the idea originated around a decade ago, during the political turmoil surrounding the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff and the growing prominence of then-congressman Jair Bolsonaro. The project took years to reach the screen, but its central anxieties only became more relevant in the meantime. That prolonged development is fitting for a film about political transformation disguised as a series of ordinary social interactions.
The abyss does not always announce itself as one. Sometimes it arrives as an invitation into a home, a concerned question or an offer to pray.
Conclusion
Across these five films, history appears not as a closed sequence of events but as a collection of mechanisms continually being repackaged for the present. Wild Horse Nine finds American intervention hiding behind cynical camaraderie. La Bola Negra considers art as a means of rescuing lives and affections from fascist erasure. Funk confronts the struggle over who is permitted to embody Brazilian culture. Ink dramatizes the transformation of public information into a profitable engine of resentment, while The French Teacher locates political extremism inside the intimate language of family, faith and supposed concern.
The films do not offer a coherent diagnosis, much less a shared solution. Some look backward, searching for the moment when catastrophe might still have been prevented. Others look directly at the present and find people already learning how to live, create and perform inside it. Together, however, they demonstrate why watching films during a politically charged festival can feel different from encountering them individually months later. The screen becomes both a mirror and a window: a reflection of the anxieties carried into the theater and an opening onto experiences beyond them.
-Raul
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