The Riverbank

Premiering in main competition at the Locarno Film Festival 2026, Matheus Farias and Enock Carvalho’s The Riverbank (A Margem do Rio) pulses with dark, tropical atmosphere, a heated, shivering bundle of racy desire and cavernous menace. It buzzes with this strange, scary, sinister and sensuous personality of its own, aware of the subterranean networks of power undergirding desire. The filmmakers thrust us in Brazil’s Recife, a city recently on vivid display in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Cannes winner and Oscar-nominated breakout, The Secret Agent. Farias himself co-edited the Wagner Moura starrer that took a heady dive into Recife’s past. The Riverbank situates Recife in a stealthy stream of intrigue, deception and intoxicating seduction.