As São Paulo-based development and training hub BrLab gears up for its 15th anniversary edition in 2026, one of Latin America’s most influential project labs has opened submissions and unveiled a raft of changes designed to expand its reach, deepen its support for emerging talent and push sustainability up the regional agenda.

The 15th BrLab will run April 7-14, primarily in São Paulo, with satellite activities in Brasilia and Recife. Producers, directors and writers from across Latin America, Spain and Portugal will convene for a week of labs, market encounters and open-industry programming.

Applications for its four 2026 workshops – BrLab Features, BrLab Rough Cut, BrLab Audience Design and the new BrLab Kids – are free and open from Nov. 12 to Dec. 12, 2025 via the lab’s website.

“For us, every edition is an opportunity to identify what’s being imagined across the region,” says BrLab founder, director and curator Rafael Sampaio. “The industry trusts us with new ideas year after year.”

Founded in 2011 and organized by Klaxon Cultura Audiovisual, BrLab has grown from a small workshop for Latin American features into a compact but influential platform, more training hub than full-blown market, yet firmly embedded in the regional calendar for projects looking to sharpen their creative and financial strategies.

Supported by institutions such as the Ibermedia program, Projeto Paradiso and Spcine – and now Petrobras as a multi-year sponsor – BrLab receives more than 400 submissions annually, curated by a professional selection committee. 

As of 2025, 62 features that passed through its various sections have been produced and released, 17 more are in post-production and another 10 are financed for production through 2026. By next year the tally of completed films linked to the lab is expected to approach 90.

Many have premiered at top-tier festivals, including Cannes, Venice, Berlin, San Sebastián, Locarno, Sundance and Toronto. Recent standouts include “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo,” which won the top prize at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard; “Levante” (Cannes Critics’ Week 2023); “Légua,” which screened at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight; Sundance title “Los Tiburones”; Berlinale competition multi-prize winner “Las Heiresses”; and San Sebastián Golden Shell laureate “Los Reyes del Mundo.” “The Wolf Behind the Door,” selected in BrLab’s very first edition in 2011, later bowed at Toronto and San Sebastián, announcing a new talent to track in Fernando Coimbra.

Avoiding the Crowded Fall Festival Corridor

Starting with this 15th edition, BrLab has permanently shifted from its traditional October slot to early April. The move is designed to avoid the crowded fall festival corridor and give projects more time to polish scripts and cuts before premiering in the back half of the year.

“This change creates a more useful rhythm for project development,” Sampaio says. “We want our selected teams to take full advantage of the international circuit, and April positions them well to do that – especially for the Rough Cut Lab.”

In 2021, BrLab launched BrLab CoPro, a curated boutique co-production forum aimed at galvanizing new partnerships with Brazil and other Latin American territories. The forum invites producers, funds, sales agents and broadcasters looking to structure cross-border packages at a time when co-production has become essential for financing and circulation.

This platform is deepening BrLab’s role as a connector not only of talent but of the institutional and industrial players that can actually get films made.

Flagship Labs and Audience Design

The program’s backbone remains BrLab Features, focused on fiction features from Latin America plus Spain and Portugal. 12 projects will receive mentorship on script, direction, production and distribution from a roster of regional heavyweights. Longtime backer Programa Ibermedia, a partner since the first edition, will once again offer participation grants to selected teams.

Running in parallel, BrLab Rough Cut caters to fiction and documentary features in the editing stage from across the Ibero-American world, pairing each project with an editing tutor and a small group of peers to help fine-tune the cut and position the film for festivals, sales and distribution.

After an initial phase centered on Brazil, BrLab’s Audience Design program returns with a broader remit, now open to the whole of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. Inspired by methodologies Sampaio first encountered at TorinoFilmLab, the workshop helps teams think strategically about audiences from development onwards, mapping core and secondary viewers and plotting release paths that can combine festivals, theaters, platforms and alternative circuits.

“In Brazil everyone talks about ‘creating new audiences,’ but for years people have become disconnected from our own cinema — they’re simply not educated to see themselves on screen,” Sampaio explained. “That’s why we need spaces like BrLab, where Latin American narratives and histories can be developed and protected, even as we keep one eye on the market, because being represented on screen is a right.”

Kids Lab in Recife

The biggest new innovation now announced for 2026 is BrLab Kids, a new workshop dedicated to film and series projects for children and young audiences, which will unspool in Recife. The initiative responds to what Sampaio sees as a chronic lack of specific public policy and institutional support for kids content in Brazil and much of Latin America.

“If children don’t grow up watching Latin American stories, they won’t feel connected to our history and our cinema when they become adults,” he argued.

Projects selected for BrLab Kids will receive tutorship from writers specialized in young audiences, including Janaína Tokitaka and Gabriella Mancini, alongside pedagogical consultants. Recife-based producer Nara Aragão will oversee production mentoring.

For Sampaio, the kids strand is closely linked to the audience-design push, offering a space to tackle the challenges of family titles competing with U.S. studio fare while trying to build a loyal local audience for regional stories.

Green Initiative With Petrobras

Backed for the first time by Petrobras as presenting partner and lead sponsor, BrLab’s 15th edition will also launch a sustainability push. Curated by pioneering green-production specialist Ariane Ferreira, the lab has assembled Think Tank BrLab Petrobras, together with Cinema Verde Festival, an initiative to adapt emerging international eco-standards to Latin American realities and to encourage local institutions to integrate environmental criteria into film funding.

Sampaio points to new European reports and incentive schemes around greener film and TV production as a reference, but stresses that Latin America is starting from a different baseline. The aim, he says, is to convene the industry around practical steps that can be progressively adopted in the region.

“In many cases, the only real green practices in our region are happening on big international streamer shows that arrive with their own protocols,” he says. “If we can pilot ideas in the audiovisual sector, that can also inspire changes in other parts of society.”

Co-Production Hub in a Rebounding Brazil

BrLab’s 15th edition comes as Brazilian cinema experiences renewed momentum. After years of funding paralysis, minority co-production schemes have been revived and Brazil is once again fast consolidating as a sought-after partner on major Latin American projects, often in combination with European finance.

“Today, foreign projects can come to BrLab to find Brazilian minority co-producers,” Sampaio notes. “When we launched, Ibermedia was practically the only co-production avenue. Now there are multiple funds, and the lab has become a natural meeting point.”