RT Features is positioning this as a prestige play — Teixeira, fresh off producing an Oscar-winning film and a Cannes competition entry, continues his streak of backing visionary auteurs. The message: RT isn't just Hollywood's Latin American connection; it's becoming the bridge between arthouse sensibilities and ambitious genre storytelling.
Sources close to RT Features say this deal signals Teixeira is actively expanding beyond his comfort zone of A-list American directors like James Gray and Noah Baumbach. 'Bodies of Summer' represents a calculated gamble on a filmmaker whose previous work has been critically adored but commercially modest — a pattern the industry will be watching closely.
Iván Fund won the Berlin Film Festival 2025 Silver Bear Jury Prize for 'The Message.' RT Features produced 'I'm Still Here,' which became the first Brazilian Portuguese-language film to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards in the International Feature Film category. The announcement came just hours before Teixeira's scheduled 90-minute masterclass at Madrid's ECAM Forum on June 10, 2026.
With 'Bodies of Summer,' Rodrigo Teixeira is betting that audiences want to sit with uncomfortable questions about mortality and digital consciousness — whether they asked for it or not. Twenty years in, RT Features remains unafraid of taking risks that bigger studios won't touch.
Rodrigo Teixeira's Brazil-based RT Features has officially boarded 'Bodies of Summer,' a sci-fi drama from Argentine director Iván Fund, Variety confirmed on June 10. The company will produce and fully-finance the project, marking another bold expansion into international auteur cinema for the studio celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Fund arrives at this partnership fresh off winning the Berlin Film Festival's 2025 Silver Bear Jury Prize for his film 'The Message.' His latest venture explores what happens when death becomes optional — in 'Bodies of Summer,' consciousness can survive digitally after a body expires, then be transferred into a new physical form.
The catch? That new vessel comes at a price. Protagonist Rana spends 100 years as data before returning to life in the cheapest body available, only to discover his son has aged into an old man who deliberately chose natural death over joining the system.
It's a premise that drips with existential dread while promising genre thrills. The screenplay was co-written by Fund and Martín Felipe Castagnet, whose novel of the same name won France's Saint-Nazaire MEET Young Latin American Literature Award. This marks their third collaboration following 'Dusk Stone,' which premiered at Venice Days in 2021, and 'The Message.' Castagnet has since been recognized as one of Granta Magazine's best young writers in Spanish, selected for the Bogotá39 list of outstanding Latin American authors under 40 — literary credentials that give this project serious adaptation pedigree.
RT Features' decision to fully finance 'Bodies of Summer' speaks volumes about its ambitions. The company's recent track record includes producing Walter Salles' 'I'm Still Here,' which made Oscar history as the first Brazilian film to win Best International Feature Picture, and James Gray's Cannes competition entry 'Paper Tiger.' Yet Teixeira has increasingly signaled interest in building a slate with younger international voices — Argentina's Benjamin Naishtat ('Glaxo') and Guatemala's Jayro Bustamante ('República Luminosa') are also on the roster.
Adding Fund to that list cements RT Features as perhaps the most reliable bridge between Latin American cinema and global distribution. The timing of this announcement carries its own drama: it dropped just hours before Teixeira took the stage at Madrid's ECAM Forum for a 90-minute masterclass, effectively positioning him as both industry veteran and ongoing innovator. Twenty years after launching RT Features in São Paulo, Teixeira continues demonstrating why studios from Scorsese to Guadagnino have trusted him with their most ambitious projects — he's not afraid of stories that ask audiences to sit with discomfort. Whether 'Bodies of Summer' finds commercial footing or remains a festival darling, one thing is clear: Teixeira plays the long game, and this move suggests he sees international genre cinema as the next territory worth conquering.
