BrLab Announces Winners, With FiGa Films Acquiring ‘Red Nest’

Brazil’s development and training hub BrLab has announced the winners of its fifteenth version, with Miami-based FiGa Films buying the sales rights to Val Hidalgo and Alice Stamato’s prizewinning drama “Ninho Tinto” (Red Nest).

The movie from the Brazilian duo was among 12 tasks chosen for the annual event, which hosts producers, administrators and writers from across Latin America, Spain and Portugal for per week of workshops, labs, mentorship and business programming in São Paulo. A sequence of satellite tv for pc occasions also happen in Brasília and Recife by early May.

Since its first version in 2011, BrLab has grown from a small workshop for regional filmmakers into a key participant in the development of unbiased cinema in Brazil, Latin America and the wider Ibero-American area, with tasks from over 15 international locations invited to participate this yr. 

“Reaching 15 years is both a celebration and a statement of persistence,” said BrLab founder, director and curator Rafael Sampaio. “Also, it’s a moment to evaluate and reaffirm our purposes and structures, considering all changes and challenges we’ve been facing in different countries in Latin America and everywhere.” 

Sampaio famous that “this a region full of talents and creativity where producers and filmmakers constantly navigate instability — financial, political, institutional. In this international context, BrLab has become a regular solid event where projects are challenged and supported, experiencing this initial and fundamental moment in which a film is still only words and intentions.”

Along with its rigorously curated line-up and hands-on method to the development and help of each project, BrLab features as a vital bridge connecting filmmakers to each the regional and the worldwide business.

“Filmmakers and producers don’t just develop their films in isolation — they connect not only with themselves and tutors but also with co-producers, festivals and decision-makers that we bring to be part of each edition of BrLab, helping to position the curated projects internationally from an early stage,” said Sampaio. “In a context where structural support can be inconsistent, that mix of rigor, continuity and real access is what allows projects to move forward — not just as ideas, but as films that can exist and circulate.”

This yr noticed organizers introduce a raft of modifications, including a shift from the event’s conventional October slot to early April, the launch of BrLab Kids, a new workshop devoted to movie and sequence tasks for youngsters and younger audiences, and the introduction of a inexperienced initiative targeted on sustainable business practices in Latin America, backed by the event’s new presenting associate and lead sponsor, Petrobas. 

“It is not about changing what already works — it’s about consolidating it and expanding its reach,” said Sampaio. “Rather than a shift in format, what we’ve done is to solidify the core of BrLab — the depth of the labs, the close mentorship, the international dialogue — while creating new layers around it. The idea is to strengthen the ecosystem that surrounds the projects, not just the projects themselves.” 

One of the key additions this yr was the Think Tank, which the lab developed in partnership with Petrobras and Cinema Verde. “It opens a space for broader, more strategic reflection on the Brazilian and Latin American industry — bringing together different players to discuss structural challenges, sustainability and the future of audiovisual production in Brazil and Latin America,” said Sampaio. “It’s less about immediate outcomes and more about long-term positioning.”

As of 2025, 62 feature movies that participated in BrLab’s varied sections have been produced and launched, among them Diego Céspedes’ “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo” (Chile), which gained the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard part last yr; Lila Halla’s “Levante” (Brazil), which screened in Cannes Critics’ Week in 2023; and “Légua,” by Portuguese filmmakers Filipa Reis and João Guerra, which premiered at Directors’ Fortnight the same yr.

That observe document is a tribute to the work that Sampaio and the organizing team continue to do to pursue their imaginative and prescient despite what he refers to as “institutional fragility,” notably with funding for Brazil’s national movie company, Ancine, slashed under right-wing former president Jair Bolsonaro. Ancine was not among the supporters of the fifteenth version of BrLab, which befell by partnerships with Programa Ibermedia, Spcine, Projeto Paradiso and Petrobras.

“The absence of Ancine was something unexpected that had an impact on the co-pro forum, but…our trajectory taught us we need to be more solid than our institutions,” Sampaio said. “The history of Latin American cinema and of BrLab reflects much more the struggle of professionals than institutions. It’s the effort of an international industry against the fragility of our politics and governments.”

Here’s a rundown of this yr’s BrLab winners:

Vitrine Films Distribution Award: “Irmã Mais Velha” (The Older Sister)
Director: Rafaela Camelo
Producers: André Pereira, Mariana Muniz
Screenwriters: Rafaela Camelo, André Pereira

After her older sister dies tragically, 11-year-old Isabel is compelled to live along with her mom, Verônica, who hides a long-suppressed reward: the ability to channel the lifeless. Camelo, whose first feature, “The Nature of Invisible Things,” premiered at the Berlinale last yr, famous: “I like to say that [my first film] shows how not every death has to be a tragedy. In ‘The Older Sister,’ the perspective on death changes radically. Here, death is inherently the tragedy that sets the story in motion. Isabel and Verônica must face this loss together, experience grief in its full intensity, and deal with the consequences it brings to their lives.”

Pop Up Film Residency Award: “El Umbral” (The Threshold)
Director: Inti Jacanamijoy
Producers: Jorge Forero, Inti Jacanamijoy
Screenwriter: Inti Jacanamijoy, Óscar Adán

A coming-of-age story about grief, reminiscence and ancestral data, “The Threshold” follows a younger boy who returns to his household residence after the dying of his grandfather, a famend shaman. When his grandmother also falls sick and prepares to cross the Kuriyako, the sacred place the place her people go to die, an ancestral presence arrives in the home, blurring the boundary between the residing and the lifeless. It’s a movie that “connects a family story with the spiritual and metaphysical universe that inhabits our territories,” according to Forero, presenting “a cinematic proposal with the potential to become a standout film in today’s landscape.”

Cinéma en Développement + Projeto Paradiso Award: “Dentro do Rio” (Inside the River)
Director/screenwriter: Bárbara Matias Kariri
Producer: Maurício Macêdo

When the building of a dam threatens to submerge the indigenous community of Barro Vermelho, Lourdes, a trainer and single mom, is torn between accepting compensation and shifting to the metropolis or resisting alongside her household and community, for whom ancestry is a drive of resistance and renewal. Matias Kariri said the story is “rooted in the Kariri cosmovision, bringing a perspective from Brazil’s deep interior with authenticity, imagination and a strong sense of authorship.” It makes use of a singular mixture of animation with influences from theater and poetry to “reimagine trauma while opening space for other ways of being and understanding the world.”

Cesnik, Quintino, Salinas, Valerio and Fittipaldi Award: “A Última Cachorra” (The Last Dog on Earth)
Director: Nina Kopko
Producer: Letícia Friederich
Screenwriters: Tainá Tokitaka, Nina Kopko

Set in the very close to future in São Paulo, the place a new pandemic is believed to have eradicated the planet’s canine inhabitants, a rideshare driver is compelled to determine if she’s going to stay to her plan to take her personal life or discover a method to defend what could also be the last canine on earth. “Stories involving dogs create an immediate connection with a large part of the audience, due to the emotional place they occupy in our lives,” said the filmmakers. “Imagining a world where they are disappearing generates even more curiosity, especially as it takes place in the near future — both strange and familiar.”

BrLab Audience Design

Vitrine Lab Award: “Show da Xoxa” (Xoxa’s Show)
Director/screenwriter: Rastricinha Dorneles 
Producer: Hilda Pontes Lopes

The dystopian parody “Xoxa’s Show” is ready in a world the place Brazil’s most in style TV present stars are subjected to humiliations and violent challenges disguised as leisure. When members of the crew start to die, the line between spectacle and extermination begins to blur. Led by a trans crew and solid, “Xoxa’s Show” is “a celebration of the creativity of trans people,” said Dorneles. “Participating in BrLab is very important so that our careers, mine as a transvestite and Hilda’s as a non-binary person, are recognized and we can realize this work that plays with the collective imagination of the trans population with extreme intimacy.”

BrLab Rough Cut

Tanto Award: “Ninho Tinto” (Red Nest)
Directors: Val Hidalgo, Alice Stamato
Producer: Thiago Briglia

Set in northern Brazil, “Red Nest” follows a Venezuelan immigrant, Frangela, whose secure life is upended by the surprising arrival of her 11-year-old son. With Alejandro’s arrival, each Frangela and her associate attempt to build an emotional bond with the boy as they try and create a new residence. “What is a home?” the administrators requested. While the phrase can imply many issues, “there is something that always runs through it: the affections we weave around it, the people we form bonds with, and the small gestures through which we offer and share parts of ourselves,” they said. “Red Nest” provides “a sensitive portrait of how these bonds are rebuilt within a migratory context shaped by vulnerability. Yet it is also, above all, a gesture of resilience and an affirmation of life.”