Phenomena Festival is a home for filmmakers who create worlds that don’t ask for permission.
For almost a decade, we’ve been celebrating bold visions in sci-fi, fantasy, horror, animation, thrillers, and every strange constellation of genre-bending stories that refuses to sit quietly in a box.
Our screenings take place inside Circuito Spcine, the largest public cinema network in the world. This means something rare: your film meets an audience that is truly diverse. People of all ages, backgrounds, and walks of life sit together in the dark, discovering independent cinema as a shared spark. Every session is free to the public, and every filmmaker is invited into a space where art is treated as a common language, not a luxury.
We champion films that linger — the ones that slip under the skin, whisper after the credits, and expand what cinema can be.
We look for meaning woven inside imagination, for risk-takers who trust their instincts, for visions that might be too strange, too raw, or too ambitious for the usual circuits. If it carries your unique voice, we want to see it.
Phenomena is international by nature: over the years we’ve welcomed works from nearly every corner of the world — from Mongolia to Iran, Russia to Argentina, what connects them isn’t geography, but courage.
Our week-long program includes screenings, conversations with creators, workshops, and encounters that tend to spill into the night. There’s no rating restriction, and no pressure to dilute your vision. We protect the filmmaker’s independence, and we celebrate audacity.
If you’re crafting a film that bends the rules, cracks open reality, or stares into the uncanny with clarity and heart, we invite you to submit to Phenomena Festival.
Bring us the impossible, the intimate, the unsettling, the beautiful.
Let’s make cinema that matters — and offer it to the people it was meant for.
Submit your film and join us in São Paulo. Expect the unexpected.
Every year, Phenomena opens a narrow passage — a window where only a few films may cross into the realm of our competitive program.
It is not a matter of quantity, but of resonance: we select the works that vibrate with the unseen, the daring, and the whispered forces that shape the human soul.
For 2026, this passage takes the form of our Lucky 13:
13 Brazilian short films, 13 international short films, and 13 short animations, each chosen for the distinct light they cast on the unknown.
In the realm of feature films, only 7 shall be summoned — the ones whose visions expand beyond narrative and enter the territory of myth.
The Nightmask
Our award, the Nightmask, crafted by artist Davi Cananéia, is not merely an object.
It is a guardian.
A vessel for the mysteries that live in all of us — the luminous, the shadowed, the fragments of memory and dream that cinema has the power to awaken.
To receive the Nightmask is to be recognized as a storyteller who has crossed thresholds.
Someone who has dared to reveal what most people only glimpse in silence.
Award Categories
Best Feature Film – Nightmask
Best Brazilian Short Film – Nightmask
Best International Short Film – Nightmask
Best Short Animation – Nightmask
Our Vision
We seek works born at the edges — where genre becomes a language for intuition, ritual, and transformation.
Films that slip between reality and the dream-state.
Stories that move like omens, constellations, signals in the dark.
Cinema is an ancient form of spellcraft: a way of invoking worlds, summoning fears, illuminating paths, and dissolving the borders between imagination and truth.
In 2026, we honor the creators who walk this path with courage.
Those who turn vision into myth, and myth into light.
Submit your film. Step into the passage. Let the unseen rise.
