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Gabriel Mascaro, director of the 2025 Berlinale Grand Jury Prize winner “The Blue Trail,” and top Brazilian producer Paula Cosenza (“Memory House”) have teamed to create Trema, launched as a Northeast Brazil production
powerhouse. Trema is headquartered in Recife, Mascaro’s home city and capital of Pernambuco state.
Now up and running, Trema is focusing on international co-productions, scripted series and auteur-driven cinema with global reach.
“I am delighted to be able to foster production in Northeast Brazil – the place where I was born, grew up, and have always lived, and where I am proud to have a new company,” Mascaro told Variety just few days before his landmark “The Blue Trail” crowned a landmark awards run with two statuettes at the Brazilian Academy Film Awards, popularly known as the Prêmio Grande Otelo (Denise Weinberg won Best Actress, while Rodrigo Santoro snagged Best Supporting Actor). “The goal is to transform the symbolic prominence of Pernambuco cinema into concrete infrastructure for production, financing, development, platform partnerships, and talent exchange.”
A pioneering international co-producer – Cosenza’s credits include Cannes title “Memory House,” “Tropicalia” (seen at Telluride) and Berlin’s “Absence,” all made with international partners – Cosenza will attend the Locarno Film Festival to present Trema and its titles and look for new projects.
As for his follow-up to “The Blue Trail” (“O Último Azul”), Mascaro is “very excited to be developing my next movie, while also exploring the possibility of adapting a Brazilian literary work,” he told Variety.
The production will be set up at Trema, which also launches with a powerful slate of titles from established or fast-emerging Brazilian and Latin American talent: “Three Dark Nights,” by Theo Court, produced by Spain’s El Viaje, Chile’s Quijote, Mexico’s Varios Lobos and Trema; “Rafael,” directed by Brazilian João Paulo Miranda Maria (“Memory House”) and produced with France’s Les Valseurs; “Arca,” from Chile’s Matías Bize (“The Life of Fish”), produced by Chile’s Maria Wood Producciones, Potenza Producciones and Trema, and the first film financed by Trema’s own fund that mixes public and private investors; “Paula & Hortencia,” by Brazil’s Joca Georgia Guerra-Peixe, and from Café Royal, Trema and Belladona; “Oásis” a limited series directed by Gabriela Amaral Almeida and Armando Praça, and produced by Trema and top Recife companies Carnaval Filmes and Desvia and co-produced with Coral Europa in Portugal
All these productions are healthily or nearly fully financed. “We are talking about titles which are going to get made,” Cosenza told Variety, emphasizing the company’s commitment to working both within auteur-driven cinema and in bigger, more popular productions.
Trema’s productions run a broad gamut from “100 Days” by Carlos Saldanha, produced by Ventre, Trema, Boipeba, O2 Filmes, Total Post, Good Hand and Disney’s BVI and “A Grande Castração,” by Andre Antonio and Rodrigo Almeida, backed by Surto e Deslumbramento, Zebra, Desvia and Trema.
The projects see Cosenza and indeed Mascaro working with prior partners: Quijote co-produced “The Blue Trail”; “Arca” producer Patricio Pereira produced Andrés Wood’s Sundance winner “Violeta Went to Heaven,” partnered by Cosenza.
Trema is already establishing a direct line between Recife’s industry and the international production scene. Its main aims, however, also take in enrolling Recife’s key craft talent on projects, bringing on the next generation of great filmmakers in Brazil’s Northeast, and attracting shoots to the state. That means incorporating talent from not just Recife or Pernambuco but other parts of the region. Gabriela Amaral, for instance, is from Bahia, just south of Pernambuco; Armando Praça from Ceará.
“Kleber and I were the first generation that had the privilege of not being forced to move to Rio or São Paulo to gain recognition. Now at a very beautiful moment of a pulsating Brazilian cinema, it is so empowering to bring attention to the huge talent living and working in Brazil’s Northeast,” Mascaro said.
“The most important thing is for us to become a hub looking at Brazil’s Northeast, showing how strong regional companies can support big-name filmmakers but also young filmmakers,” he added.
Northeastern shoots are being planned. Based on a true crime that occurred at Ceará’s Praia do Futuro, “Oasis” will shoot in Ceará and Pernambuco, said Cosenza. Already, “A Grande Castração” was shot in Recife. “Save the Date,” an independent romantic comedy directed by Cris D’Amatto, filmed in Pernambuco.
To build on its plans, Trema benefits from several tailwinds. Featured prominently in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s four-time Oscar-nominated “The Secret Agent,” Recife is already home to two of the four Brazilian directors who have recently helped catapult Brazil onto the international stage: Mendonça Filho and Mascaro. Also from Recife, Marcelo Gomes’ “Joaquim” (2017) played in Berlinale main competition while “Paloma” (2022) won a Chicago Silver Hugo.
Director of Cannes’ Un Certain Regard winner “The Invisible Life” as well as Cannes main competition contender “Firebrand,” Karim Aïnouz is a native of neighbouring Ceará, whose capital Fortaleza is heavily featured in another Aïnouz Cannes main competition entry, “Motel Destino.”
Aïnouz has been actively involved in Ceará training initiatives, as well as having a career deeply intertwined with talent from Pernambuco, including Gomes himself, a longtime collaborator and co-director of Aïnouz’s “I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You,” which premiered in Venice in 2009.
As Variety has noted in an extensive drill-down on the city’s film scene, Recife boasted a vibrant silent cinema movement in the 1920s. This was resurrected almost from scratch from the mid-90s with Lírio Ferreira and Paulo Caldas’s “Perfumed Ball” (1996), Marcelo Gomes’ “Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures” (2005), a Cannes Un Certain Regard winner, and“I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You” (2009), which played Venice.
In late March this year, as part of Lula’s governmental regional incentive program, Pernambuco was granted R$24,6 million ($5 million), with R$20 million ($4 million) coming from the federal government through the FSA and the remainder from the state through Adepe.
None of the projects on the company’s slate have received support from the regional FSA fund, Mascaro underscored. “Trema” was not set up as a vehicle to access this funding. Our strategy is much broader,” he added. The fund will fortify other Recife companies, however, consolidating the city’s talent base, all while sharpening its focus on international co-productions.
Talk of Pernambuco’s huge talent, moreover, is no pipe dream: It’s a reality. Mendonça Filho noted to Variety this April that five creatives from Pernambuco were awarded Platino Awards for their work on “The Secret Agent”: Tomaz Alves Souza and Mateus Alves for original score; Thales Junqueira for production design and Eduardo Serrano and Matheus Farias for editing. “It only reiterates the notion that you can make great cinema in Recife. It’s crazy that it would even be up for discussion in 2026,” Mendonça Filho said.
Editor Farias, also a director, is in competition in Locarno with “The Riverbank,” his directorial feature debut, co-directed with partner Enock Carvalho. Both filmmakers are from Recife, with the city being at the heart of their queer erotic thriller, a sharp social critique that hones into the complex sociopolitical fabric of Recife and the wider Brazil. Older talent from Recife is now moving back to the city, Mascaro noted.
Challenges remain, however, including the biggest for Brazil’s film industry at large: Whether Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will remain in office after general elections, held Oct. 4. Victory by Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, would almost certainly spell an end to significant Brazilian federal state support for its industry.
At one of his first major public events ahead of the elections, Bolsonaro invited Argentina’s president Javier Milei — who gravely defunded the country’s film-TV institute INCAA — to share his stage, a gloomy forecast of what can lie ahead for the Brazilian cultural sector.
“I’ve always made films and series in co-production. My very first film, ‘The Samba Within Me,’ a doc feature about a Rio samba school directed by Joca Georgia Guerra-Peixe, was co-produced out of Portugal and Germany. Co-production is something that I like, and I love,” said Cosenza. International co-production, like private-sector investment, will allow films to scale, she added.
Such financing lines may also prove invaluable in other ways. “Whether private or public funding or distribution, Paula is working hard to not depend totally on the Brazilian situation,” said Mascaro, referring to the upcoming elections.
Almost all of Brazil’s industry is crossing its fingers that this “situation” will not happen.
