Brazil
Brazil is the most populous country in Latin America and one of its two largest audiovisual markets, and it is the only Portuguese-language partner Canada holds a co-production treaty with anywhere. Its cinema carries a deep lineage — the Cinema Novo movement of the 1960s reshaped world film grammar — and in 2025 it reached a new peak: I'm Still Here, directed by Walter Salles, won Brazil's first Academy Award for Best International Feature and was nominated for Best Picture. Just as significant for anyone weighing this corridor is the direction of travel. After several lean years, the federal government has moved audiovisual back to the centre of cultural policy, restoring and expanding the sector's main funding instrument and drawing the global streaming platforms into Brazilian production at scale. The treaty Canada signed with Brazil in 1995 is an older instrument — and it connects to a market whose public-funding wind, for once, is blowing in the right direction.
The 1995 agreement is an older instrument and carries no automatic incentive of its own — Brazilian and Canadian benefits each flow from domestic programs. On the Canadian side, CPTC and provincial credits apply to eligible Canadian expenditure as usual. On the Brazilian side, the live picture is one of recovery: the federal government has restored the Audiovisual Sector Fund (FSA) and committed major new resources, including a plan of roughly R$1.4 billion for 2026, though disbursement remains below the pre-pandemic peak. The most usable incentive for an incoming production is the São Paulo (SPcine) cash rebate. A regulatory framework requiring the streaming platforms to invest in Brazilian content is under development and could reshape the financing landscape further. Confirm current FSA and rebate terms before budgeting. Current as of June 2026.
Brazil's production base is large, concentrated, and increasingly internationalized. São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro hold the deepest crew and facilities, and the global streaming platforms have made Brazil one of their principal Latin American production centres — adding co-financing capacity and worldwide distribution reach that did not exist when the treaty was signed. ANCINE, the national film agency, both regulates the sector and administers treaty co-production on the Brazilian side; the Audiovisual Sector Fund it oversees is the country's central public financing instrument.
The funding direction is the corridor's defining feature right now, and at the moment it is strikingly positive. After several years in which federal audiovisual support was sharply curtailed, the current government has restored the FSA, brought the national development bank back into film financing, and approved a federal plan in the order of R$1.4 billion for 2026. The honest qualifier is that disbursement has not yet returned to the pre-pandemic high, and a separate effort to regulate streaming-platform investment in Brazilian content is still being written — so the exact shape of the financing environment a year out is not fully settled. But the trajectory is clearly one of reinvestment.
For an incoming production, the most concrete incentive is the SPcine cash rebate, run by the city of São Paulo — billed as Brazil's first cash rebate for foreign productions, returning 20–30% on qualified local spend and already drawing streaming-backed projects into the city. The festival and market calendar centres on the São Paulo International Film Festival (the Mostra), the Festival de Gramado for Brazilian and Latin American cinema, and Rio2C, the large creative-industries market in Rio de Janeiro; Brazilian producers also work Ventana Sur in Buenos Aires and the Berlin, Cannes, and Toronto circuit.
Why this corridor
In Brazil, the public-funding wind is, for now, at a Canadian producer's back. The combination of a government actively reinvesting in audiovisual, a working cash rebate in São Paulo, streaming platforms spending heavily, and a film culture fresh off its first Academy Award makes this a moment of expansion rather than retrenchment. The qualifiers are real and worth stating plainly: the treaty is an old, light-touch instrument; federal disbursement is still recovering; and the streaming-investment rules are unwritten. But the direction is favourable and the market is enormous.
Portuguese is the working language, which is both a distinguishing feature and a practical consideration — the treaty's trilingual provision (English, French, or Portuguese, in any combination) makes versioning workable, but a Canadian producer should plan for Portuguese-language production management on the ground. Documentary and auteur-driven fiction are natural entry points, given Brazil's strengths and the relatively modest budgets at which a first co-production can be structured. Rubedo is looking for Brazilian producers and researchers with international co-production experience, and for Canadian producers drawn to a large audiovisual market in a phase of active reinvestment.
Where to start
If you're a researcher, student, or filmmaker interested in this corridor, here's where to begin.
Start here
ANCINE (Agência Nacional do Cinema, gov.br/ancine) is the regulator and the certifying authority for treaty co-productions on the Brazilian side; Telefilm Canada administers the treaty on the Canadian side. Because the FSA framework is being actively rebuilt, confirm the current status of federal funding and co-production certification directly with ANCINE rather than relying on secondary summaries.
The most usable incentive
SPcine (spcine.com.br), the city of São Paulo's film and television body, runs the cash rebate that is the most concrete financial draw for an incoming production. Its published terms and application windows are the practical starting point for structuring a São Paulo-based shoot.
Industry events
The São Paulo International Film Festival (the Mostra) and the Festival de Gramado are the principal festival rooms for Brazilian cinema, and Rio2C in Rio de Janeiro is the largest creative-industries market in the country — the most efficient venue for meeting Brazilian producers at the project level. Ventana Sur in Buenos Aires is the regional market where Brazilian and broader Latin American projects also circulate.
From the Canadian side
The most useful Canadian-side entry is the broader Latin American film community rather than any single national association. AluCine (Toronto Latin Film + Media Arts Festival) and VLAFF (Vancouver Latin American Film Festival) are long-running, accessible points of contact with Latin American filmmaking from within Canada, and Hot Docs in Toronto is the natural Canadian counterpart for documentary co-production conversations.
Cultural signal
I'm Still Here (Walter Salles, 2025) — Brazil's first Academy Award winner for Best International Feature and a Best Picture nominee — is the clearest demonstration of how completely Brazilian cinema now travels to international audiences while remaining wholly its own. It is the kind of serious, historically grounded, broadly resonant work this corridor is built to support.If you're a Brazilian filmmaker, producer, or documentary professional interested in developing this corridor — or a Canadian producer curious about what a first Canada-Brazil structure could look like in a market on the rise — we'd like to hear from you.
contact@rubedo.ca