Rio2C 2026 With Carlos Saldanha, Wagner de Assis, Esmir Filho

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — Rio2C’s expanded 2026 program will feature top speakers from Brazil’s creative industries, such as directors Wagner de Assis, Esmir Filho and Carlos Saldanha, journalist and writer Caco Barcellos, writer Thalita Rebouças, docmaker Ricardo Calil and comedian João Vicente de Castro.

This year, Rio2C will take place from May 26 to 31 at the Cidade de Artes in Rio de Janeiro, with approximately 2,000 speakers at the conference speaking on panels or giving keynotes on the current topics facing the creative industries.

Director, producer and screenwriter Wagner de Assis, founder of production company Cinética, will speak during the Faith Moves Mountains and Engages Audiences session. Panelists will discuss local productions with religious and spiritual themes.

Assis has written ten films, most of which deal with spiritualism, in particular Kardecist spiritualism. Allan Kardec codified his doctrine in 19th-century France, but Brazil has traditionally had the largest number of followers and sympathizers of Kardecist spiritualism in the world.

Assis’ feature films have a captive niche audience, and some have reached the mainstream. Fox’s 2010-released “Nosso Lar” (“Astral City: A Spiritual Journey”) was a local blockbuster, selling more than 4 million tickets. “Nosso Lar 2: Os Mensageiros,” released in 2024 by Disney’s Star, also found strong box office appeal with a total attendance of 1.6 million tickets.

“Rio2C has already shown its power to bring people together and discuss relevant topics. I am very happy that the theme of spirituality, linked to cinema, is present this year,” said Assis. Variety.

The helmer is working on three new features. Disney will release ‘Nosso Lar 3: Vida Eterna’ in January 2027, starring Carol Castro and Fabio Assunção. As in the previous installments of the Nosso Lar franchise, the new picture is based on a book psychographed by the infamous Brazilian spiritualist medium Chico Xavier (1910-2002), under the influence of the spirit of André Luiz, Xavier said.

Assis filmed ‘The Fox Sisters’, an English-language biopic about the 19, in New Jersey and Connecticut^ecentury pioneers of spiritualism in the US. The feature film has premiered at festivals and will premiere in Brazil this year, he added.

He also shot ‘Emmanuel’, a biopic about Chico Xavier’s spiritual guide. Local distributor Imagem will release the film in Brazil in the second half of 2027, Assis said.

“I like the broad scope of Rio2C, which encourages the coexistence not only of cinema, but also of technology, but also of areas such as music, science and many others,” Assis emphasized. “It’s really fun to walk through the room and see people from so many different artistic and professional backgrounds.”

The intersection of film and music is key to the creative process of Esmir Filho, director-producer-screenwriter. He wrote and directed “Homem com H,” the 2025 biopic of local star singer Ney Matogrosso. Critics praised the Paris Filmes-produced and distributed pic, which sold 643,013 tickets and ranked sixth among local films last year.

Filho’s debut picture, “Os Famosos e os Duendes da Morte”, is about a teenager, Mr. Tambourine, who lives in a small town in southern Brazil and dreams of attending a Bob Dylan show.

“I’m passionate about music. For me, sound doesn’t come afterward. It’s part of the construction as I write the story. So I don’t separate cinema from music. I believe cinema is music,” Filho said. Variety. “In my projects, I always create playlists before I start writing. While I’m working on the screenplay, I’m already worried about acquiring the rights to the songs.”

Filho’s most recent production is ‘Atenção para o Refrão’, a docuseries about iconic Brazilian song refrains. His sister, Sarah Oliveira, presents the series, which has opened on pay-TV channel Bis and streaming service Globoplay.

The helmer is now working on the feature-length documentary ‘Ney por trás das máscaras’, which follows Matogrosso during the grand parade of the Rio de Janeiro Carnival in 2026. The singer was honored as the theme of the famous samba school Imperatriz Leopoldinense parade.

His next production is a film for Netflix, the most important of which is ‘The Stranger in Bed’ (‘Uma Estranha na Cama’), based on a novel by Raphael Montes, which Filho bills as offering erotic tension in a tropical version of classic films by Brian de Palma and Adrian Lyne.

Carlos Saldanha, director of the animated films ‘Ice Age: The Meltdown’, ‘Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs’, ‘Rio’, ‘Rio 2’, ‘Ferdinand’ and ‘Harold and the Purple Crayon’, will talk to Amyr Klink, the local explorer who traveled around the Antarctic continent, for a conversation about the ‘personal ocean’ as a metaphor for a journey.

The panel How to Create for Distracted Minds discusses the impact of multi-screen consumption on narrative construction. It will bring together Thalita Rebouças, author of best-selling novels aimed at teens, screenwriter Raul Perez and creator Pedro Ivo. Journalist Genesson Honorato will moderate the panel that will reflect on rhythm, language and engagement in a context of hotly contested attention.

Actor and director Heloísa Périssé, together with screenwriter Renata Sofia and director Anita Barbosa, will be part of the panel Love Is in the Air: the New Romantic Comedy, a genre that is on the rise thanks to streaming and blockbusters.

Rio2C 2026 also hosts the panel Audiovisual in Extreme Situations, with Sylvestre Campe and Gustavo Gama, director and producer of the docuseries ‘The Arctic Labyrinth’, and Karina Oliani, co-founder of Pitaya Filmes, to discuss the experiences and strategies of filmmakers facing logistical, climatic and human challenges, to capture powerful stories far from urban centers.

To complement this perspective, veterinary investigative journalist, writer and documentary maker Caco Barcellos will give a lecture on storytelling and journalistic responsibility. Barcellos has investigated police brutality, organized crime and human rights abuses in Brazil and recently covered the Iranian war.

“I will talk about my fifty years of exclusively street reporting, always pursuing two interrelated themes: violence and social and economic injustice,” Barcellos said. Variety.

Barcellos’ book “Rota 66”, published in 1993 and winner of the Jabuti Prize in the reporting category, was adapted into the fiction series “Rota 66: A Polícia que Mata” (“Rota 66: The Killer Unit”), released in September 2022 on the local streamer Globoplay.

“Abusado,” another Jabuti Prize winner, published in 2003, is an investigative and nonfiction book that tells the story of Márcio Amaro de Oliveira, the drug dealer who ruled the Santa Marta favela in Rio de Janeiro.

“‘Abusado’ will also be a series. The book is a non-fiction novel that avoids Manichaeism. There are no clear heroes or villains. Everyone is depicted as a human being simultaneously exposed to the external laws of survival and to the constant risks of gunfights, cinematic escapes and murders,” he said.

“In what may be the most controversial episode of the series, we will show how the ‘Abusado’ [Oliveira] managed to convince pop star Michael Jackson and film director Spike Lee to shoot the music video ‘They Don’t Care About Us’ in the heart of the favela, an event that made Dona Marta famous worldwide. ‘Abusado’ personally took responsibility for Jackson’s safety and that of all the musicians, models and dancers on his team,” Barcellos said.

The panel The Impact of Live Content on Audience and Business will feature Mônica Pimentel, Warner Bros. Bringing together Discovery’s VP of content and head of talent, Gabriel Volfzon, Globo’s channel director, and Douglas Rodrigues, YouTube Brasil’s strategic partner manager, to analyze live content relevance and monetization strategies.

In the Writer’s Room section of Rio2C 2026, the program will offer discussions exploring different ways of audiovisual creation, from adapting real stories to building stories based on investigative journalism. Documentary filmmaker Ricardo Calil (co-director of “Eu Sou Carlos Imperial”), Cássia Dian and Nátara Ney debate on the panel Is This Story Worth a Documentary? the criteria that guide the choice between documentary, series or feature film for productions based on true stories.

The dialogue between reality and story is the subject of Investigative Journalism at the Origin of Great Stories, a panel with Daniela Arbex, Malu Gaspar, Fábio Gusmão and Rodolfo Schneider, who will discuss how investigations are transformed into content for film and series.

In Porta dos Fundos’ How a Writers’ Room Works panel, comedian João Vicente and Daniel Belmonte will talk about the creative process of production company Porta dos Fundos, from brainstorming to character building and story development for short videos.