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RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — RioMarket, the business section of the Rio International Film Festival, will be held over Oct. 1-11, featuring for the first time a partnership with TikTok and online one-on-one business meetings.
The event, taking place in a warehouse in Rio’s port area renovated for the 2016 Summer Olympics, will gather execs and talents of the local and international film industry, with a strong presence of Asian countries, and will launch an app to connect festival film markets around the world.
The first online one-on-one business meetings were held at RioMarket 2025 and proved successful, Walkiria Barbosa, the Rio Film Festival’s executive director and head of international marketing, told Variety.
“We ran a pilot last year, and we are going to expand it this year. During the pandemic, we learned that it is possible to do business online,” she said. “We received applications from companies in several countries, including film and television production companies, streaming platforms, distributors, and television networks,” she said.
One of the new features of RioMarket 2026 is a partnership with TikTok, Barbosa said. The social media giant will hold at the event a three-day workshop for 40 TikTok content creators invited by the company from several states in Brazil. The program’s aim is to improve the quality of the content they produce through technical sessions on directing, lighting, editing, screenwriting, format development, filming, and other areas of individual content production.
“The goal is to raise the quality of entertainment content production on TikTok by connecting creators with experienced audiovisual professionals. We believe Festival do Rio, which brings together the leading players in Brazil’s entertainment industry, is the ideal setting to launch this new model,” Luciana Galastri, head of entertainment partnerships at TikTok in Latin America, told Variety.
Barbosa stressed the strong presence at RioMarket 2026 of Asian countries, particularly China, India and South Korea, as well as Russia. Over the past years, Brazilian companies are increasingly doing more business with players from these countries, while maintaining the traditional interaction with partners in the North and Latin America and Europe, she said.
From China, one of the highlights is the lecture of Spike Liu, president of China Year Technology. He will present experiences on the use of AI in content creation and production processes in the audiovisual sector.
RioMarket will profit from the presence of international players in the soft launch of its app, which aims to connect film festivals’ markets around the world. Tentatively named Connecting Screens, the platform is inspired by Cinando, the online networking and business platform for film and audiovisual professionals run by Cannes’ Marché du Film.
Connecting Screens will facilitate business meetings and provide info about projects, among many other features, Pedro Souza, president of the Financing Committee of the Audiovisual Industry and Commerce Federation (FICA), told Variety.
“While Cinando resembles Wikipedia, our app will be a sort of Tinder, Linkedin and Wikipedia. The idea is to match sellers and buyers of the audiovisual industry,” Souza said.
Ilda Santiago, Rio Fest’s exec director of programing and international projects, stressed the importance of forming a new generation of moviegoers for the festival. RioMarket 2026 will count with the presence of participants of the Generation Program, Rio Fest’s initiative dedicated to the use of films in fostering education for children and teenagers in Rio.
Santiago also underscored the significance of RioMarket: “The market feeds the festival program, and the program, in turn, feeds the market. Today, no major film festival can afford to operate without a strong industry market.”
One of the most promising panels of RioMarket 2026 is the one that will put, face to face, two of the most critically acclaimed film directors in the world: Iran’s Asghar Farhadi, of “Parallel Tales” (2026), “A Separation (2011)” and “About Elly” (2009), and Brazilian Walter Salles, of “I’m Still Here” (2024), “Central Station” (1998) and “The Motorcycle Diaries” (2004).
Another important panel is the one on LatAm Content Meeting, the Brazilian version of the Sunny Side of the Doc. Fernando Dias, the event’s founder, will provide information for non-fiction content makers interested in participating in the next edition of LatAm Content Meeting, in September 2027 in São Paulo.
There will also be two panels presenting successful cases of international co-production of documentaries resulting from deals initiated in the first two editions of LatAm Content Meeting in 2025 and 2026.
In addition, content analyst Gustavo Martínez will host a workshop centered on his approach to conflict structure in screenplays, which is based on Newton’s Third Law of Motion and aims to create points of tension and release so the audience remains engaged.
“We are holding an event on the scale of the markets at the world’s leading international film festivals,” said Barbosa, who is also the president of FICA.
She believes there is an opportunity for the growth of the Brazilian audiovisual industry.
“Our goal is to triple the industry’s share of Brazil’s GDP over the next five years. It currently stands at 0.6%. We aim to achieve this by strengthening our companies, increasing the number of movie theaters, advancing technological development and expanding exports of Brazilian productions,” Barbosa said.
