First San Francisco Brazilian Film Festival Runs September 24 to 27 at the Vogue

The first San Francisco Brazilian Film Festival runs Thursday, September 24 through Sunday, September 27 at the Vogue Theatre in Presidio Heights, with 16 films across four days and tickets at $20 per program.

The program is 11 features and five shorts. Founder Zanna de Sant’anna organized the festival independently, and told the San Francisco Chronicle she built it to reach San Francisco audiences beyond the city’s Brazilian community.

What to Expect

The festival opens on September 24 with I Only Rest in the Storm, directed by Pedro Pinho. The Portuguese title is O Riso e a Faca. It is a Portugal, France, Brazil and Romania co-production that runs 211 minutes, and it follows a Portuguese environmental engineer who takes a job in Guinea-Bissau and forms a complicated relationship with two local people. It premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in May 2025, where Cleo Diára won the section’s best actress prize.

Block out the evening for that one. At three and a half hours it is the longest thing on the schedule by a wide margin.

The festival closes with a 4K restoration of Central Station, Walter Salles’s 1998 drama. The two Salles films on the schedule are linked by one family. Fernanda Montenegro was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for Central Station, the first Brazilian actress nominated in that category. Her daughter Fernanda Torres became the second, for I’m Still Here, and Montenegro appears in that film as the older Eunice Paiva.

Why Now

Brazilian cinema has had two strong Academy Awards cycles. Salles’s I’m Still Here won Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards in 2025, the first Brazilian film to win in that category, and was also nominated for Best Picture. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent followed with four nominations at the 2026 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Wagner Moura.

Several of the films on the schedule return to Brazil’s 1964 to 1985 military dictatorship. I’m Still Here adapts Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir about his mother Eunice Paiva. The Secret Agent is set in Recife in 1977.

Details

When: Thursday, September 24 through Sunday, September 27. Opening night begins at 7pm.

Where: Vogue Theatre, 3290 Sacramento Street

Cost: $20 per program

Full schedule and tickets: cinemabrazil.org. Individual screening times were still being finalized at the time of writing, so confirm there before booking.

Getting There

The Vogue is a single-screen cinema on Sacramento Street between Presidio Avenue and Lyon Street. The 1 California and the 3 Jackson both stop within a block, and the 43 Masonic runs along Presidio Avenue a block away. Street parking in Presidio Heights is metered on Sacramento Street and time-limited on the residential blocks around it.

For more on what is on this month, see our guide to things to do in San Francisco in September 2026.

Photo: Evilninja, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.