Rodrigo Teixeira’s Brazil-based RT Features, producer of 2025 Oscar winner “I’m Still Here” and James Grey’s 2026 Cannes contender “Paper Tiger,” has boarded “Bodies of Summer,” a sci-fi drama from Iván Fund who received a Berlin Movie Competition 2025 Silver Bear Jury Prize for “The Message.”
Argentina’s Fund is ready to direct “Bodies of Summer” from a screenplay he co-wrote with Martín Felipe Castagnet, based mostly on Castagnet’s awarded novel of the identical title. “Bodies of Summer” marks the duo’s third function collectively after co-penning “Dusk Stone,” which bowed on the Venice Competition’s 2021 Venice Days, and “The Message.”
São Paulo-based, RT Options will produce and fully-finance “Bodies of Summer.” The announcement was made simply hours earlier than Teixeira would be the topic of a 90-minute speak – an efficient masterclass – at Madrid’s ECAM Forum, Spain’s latest, prestigious and nonetheless rising co-production discussion board which celebrates its third version over June September 11.
As in a lot Argentine fiction, the shadow of literary big Jorge Luis Borges falls over “Bodies of Summer,” departing from an concept, earlier than keying on this case on its human implications.
The movie is ready in a not-so-distant future the place dying is not definitive. A physique whose assets are exhausted can have its consciousness survive in a digital limbo, then come again in a special physique. That doesn’t come freed from cost, nonetheless. In “Bodies of Summer,” Rana, after 100 years as information, come again to life in a what’s described as a “makeshift body, the only one he can pay for. He returns to find his son, now an old man, who defies the system by choosing to die naturally and disappear forever.”
“Bodies of Summer” is hailed in a press assertion as “an ambitious adaptation that blends speculative science fiction with an intimate exploration of family, mortality, and human connection,” themes additionally explored in “The Message.” Of that movie Fund mentioned, when Luxbox boarded gross sales, that filmmaking is “one thing profoundly human – the place the tales we craft don’t imitate life however attain out to the touch it.
This was additionally true of “Dusk Stone,” which footage a household torn aside and pushed to irrationality by the lack of their younger son. On this sense, “Bodies of Summer” marks a 3rd function from Fund which explores a world transferring between life to dying, whereas toying with style and knit by authentic, uncommon narratives which fascinate their followers.
Fund broke out in 2010 along with his second function, “The Lips,” co-directed with Santiago Loza, a success on the Cannes Competition’s Un Sure Regard strand and the semi-documentary story of the friendship of three feminine docs in an distant, impoverished rural a part of Argentina, the portrait of their bonds with each other and sufferers saying Fund’s central career-long concern.
“Los cuerpos del verano” (translated into English as “Bodies of Summer”), Castagnet’s literary debut, received the Saint-Nazaire MEET Younger Latin American Literature Award. Following the publication of “Los mantras modernos,” Castagnet was chosen for the Bogotá39 record of Latin America’s most excellent Latin American writers underneath 40. In 2021, he was chosen by Granta Journal as the most effective younger writers within the Spanish language.
What ‘Bodies of Summer’ Alerts About RT Options’ Worldwide Ambitions
Launching RT Options in 2005, few producers anyplace exterior the U.S. have so persistently lifted off by partnering with icons of U.S. impartial cinema.
Teixeira broke out internationally by backing Noah Baumbach’s “Francis Ha” (2012). He went on to co-produce movies by Kelly Reichardt (“Night Moves,” 2013), Ira Sachs (“Love Is Strange,” 2015), Robert Eggars (“The Witch, 2015), Baumbach again (“Mistress America,” 2016) James Schamus (“Indignation,” 2016), Sachs once more, “Little Men,” 2016) whereas in 2014 launching with Martin Scorsese Sikelia, a movie fund for brand new administrators.
From Luca Guadagnino’s “Call Me By Your Name,” nominated for Greatest Image and winner of Greatest Tailored Screenplay on the 2018 ninetieth Academy Awards, Teixeira has broadened his compass, producing Eggars’ “The Lighthouse” (2019) and James Grey’s “Ad Astra” (2019) and “Armageddon Time” (2022) but in addition Olivier Assayas’ “Wasp Network” (2019) and Mia Hansen-Løve’s “Bergman Island” (2021). He adopted up by producing – together with VideoFilmes and MACT – Walter Salles’ “I’m Still Here,” the primary Brazilian Portuguese-language movie by a Brazilian director to be nominated for Greatest Image and to win an Academy Award within the Worldwide Characteristic Movie class.
Teixeira’s ECAM Discussion board speak, one of many occasion’s highlights this 12 months, catches Teixeira as RT Options celebrates 20 years and has simply world premiered on the Cannes Competition each James Grey’s competitors contender “Paper Tiger,” starring Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, and Miles Teller, and Chilean Dominga Sotomayor’s “La Perra” in Administrators’ Fortnight.
It additionally catches Teixeira ever extra exploring the potential of worldwide cinema, co-producing Michael Almereyda’s “Zero K,” starring Britt Decrease, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Selton Mello, Caleb Landry Jones, and Peter Saarsgard which was shot in Sao Paulo.
Teixeira can also be constructing a manufacturing slate packed by youthful worldwide title auteurs quick consolidating as contenders to determine among the many most foremost voices in worldwide cinema: “Glaxo,” directed by Argentina’s Benjamin Naishtat and starring Lali Espósito, Esteban Lamothe, Esteban Bigliardi, and Marcelo Subiotto and Guatemalan Jayro Bustamante’s upcoming dramatic thriller “República Luminosa.”
RT Options can also be in post-production on “Wolves,”directed by Rami Kodeih and impressed by the real-life collapse of Lebanon’s banking system in 2019. “Bodies of Summer” marks simply the newest addition to this lineup.
