Gramado Film Festival Launches First-Ever Residency for Young Brazilian Filmmakers
Sixty filmmakers aged 18 to 35 will descend on the mountain town of Gramado, in Brazil's southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, this Aug. 17-19 for the Gramado Film Festival's first-ever Residency for Young Filmmakers. The festival selected them from more than 200 applicants, each required to have worked on at least one film in production, direction, acting, screenwriting, cinematography or sound (Variety).
Rio Grande do Sul, where Gramado sits, contributed 28 of the 60 participants — the largest share from any state. The rest came from Bahia, Goiás, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Santa Catarina, Sergipe, Pernambuco and the Federal District, pulling talent from across nearly every region of the country.
The three-day programme packs 17 sessions into mornings and afternoons, with festival evening screenings folded in. Day one opens with masterclasses on distribution, screenwriting and directing, plus a panel on public policies for Brazil's audiovisual sector and an event on music scoring and sound recording. Aug. 18-19 shifts toward professional integration and market shifts, with panels on true crime, career internationalisation, film societies and professional sustainability, alongside masterclasses on production and post-production and a case study. The residency closes with sessions on cinematography and environmental sustainability in productions.
The opening masterclass carries weight. Marcio Fraccaroli, CEO of Paris Filmes, and Veronica Stumpf, a producer at Paris Entretenimento, will lead "Distribution: Paths to Finding the Audience." Paris, based in São Paulo, is described as Brazil's leading independent film distributor and a top producer of local pictures — a company whose choices shape which Brazilian films reach cinema screens and streaming platforms across the country.
Silvio Guindane, an actor, director, producer, screenwriter and playwright, teaches "Directing: Choices That Build the Film." Guindane broke through as a director with Mussum, o Filmis, a biopic about the beloved comedian and musician Mussum, a cultural figure whose career spanned television, music and comedy from the 1960s onward.
The 54th Gramado Film Festival in 2026 — one of Brazil's longest-running film events — hosts the residency alongside an international meeting of cities with Medellín, Colombia. The festival first announced the residency on its official Instagram account in May 2025.
What makes this stand out is the floor it gives to practical, working knowledge. These are not abstract lectures. A distributor explaining how a film finds its audience, a director walking through on-set choices, a panel on how public funding actually works — that is the machinery behind every film that reaches a screen, laid open for the people who will operate it next.
