Past Edition

In September 2025, Estranhos Encontros held its first in-person edition, taking over the Centro Cultural São Paulo from 25 to 28 September. Born of the wish to create a space devoted to cinema and to the forms of production that so often remain at the margins of traditional circuits, the festival brought together Brazilian, Latin American and international films in an entirely free programme.

The programme was organised along three lines. The Short Film Competition presented 20 Latin American and Portuguese-language films, bringing together filmmakers of very different trajectories, and awarded a prize to one film chosen by a jury made up of Vera Egito, Bárbara Paz, Silvio Restiffe, Pedro Gonçalves Ribeiro and Marcos Cartum.

The Horizontes programme gathered eight international features and mid-length films, while the filmmaker Paulo Sacramento was honoured with a retrospective that presented his complete filmography for the first time.

The festival closed with Sacramento's carte blanche screening, which showed a previously unseen 4K restoration of Carlos Reichenbach's Filme Demência, commissioned for the festival. The restoration came out of a partnership between Estranhos Encontros, the Cinemateca Brasileira and Cinecolor.

The programme also featured conversations with the directors of the selected shorts, a panel on programming and curating in São Paulo, a discussion between the Argentine critic Carla Maglio and the Spanish filmmaker Pablo García Canga, and a masterclass with Paulo Sacramento.

Over four days, the CCSP became a meeting point for different generations and perspectives on cinema.