Some festivals work almost like retrospectives. The Rio Film Festival, when it gets its programming right, does almost the opposite: it gives you the feeling that you are seeing, ahead of everyone else, the films we will still be talking about for months.

The 28th edition opened at the Cine Odeon with A Bola Preta, by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, the duo known as Los Javis, setting the tone for the days ahead. The film arrived in Rio after Cannes, where the pair won Best Director, and features names such as Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close.

But the scale of the festival is also visible in the numbers. The program brings together hundreds of Brazilian and international productions, while Première Brasil was selected from nearly 1,500 feature and short film submissions. It is a very concrete portrait of how much Brazilian cinema continues to produce — and how much it still wants, and needs, to be seen.

This first weekend makes the meeting between those two worlds especially clear. Among the international titles is Yellow Letters, by İlker Çatak, winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin, about a couple of theater artists persecuted by an authoritarian government in Turkey. There is also The Echo Chamber, directed by Andrea Pallaoro, based on Bernardo Bertolucci’s final screenplay and starring Alicia Vikander, Luca Marinelli and Susan Sarandon.

At the same time, Première Brasil works not only as a showcase for new films, but also as a space for conversations about memory and Brazilian history. Lucia Murat presents O Sertão das Nossas Memórias, revisiting the deaths of Carlos Lamarca and Zequinha in 1971, while Emilia Silveira brings Uma Missa para Dom Angélico, about Dom Angélico Sândalo Bernardino and his role during Brazil’s military dictatorship.

That may be one of the Rio Film Festival’s greatest charms: within a few blocks and over just a few days, you can move from a likely awards-season contender to a Brazilian documentary, from a world premiere to a conversation with the people who have just made the film.

Until October 11, Rio once again becomes a city where it is worth checking the film schedule before deciding what to do. Because some of the cinema we will be discussing over the next few months is already playing here.