Rodrigo Teixeira, Producer of ‘Paper Tiger,’ Boards Sci-Fi Drama ‘Bodies of Summer’ From Berlin Winner Iván Fund (EXCLUSIVE)
Rodrigo Teixeira’s Brazil-based RT Features, producer of 2025 Oscar winner “I’m Still Here” and James Gray’s 2026 Cannes contender “Paper Tiger,” has boarded “Bodies of Summer,” a sci-fi drama from Iván Fund who won a Berlin Film Festival 2025 Silver Bear Jury Prize for “The Message.”
Argentina’s Fund is set to direct “Bodies of Summer” from a screenplay he co-wrote with Martín Felipe Castagnet, based on Castagnet’s awarded novel of the same name. “Bodies of Summer” marks the duo’s third feature together after co-penning “Dusk Stone,” which bowed at the Venice Festival’s 2021 Venice Days, and “The Message.”
São Paulo-based, RT Features will produce and fully-finance “Bodies of Summer.” The announcement was made just hours before Teixeira will be the subject of a 90-minute talk – an effective masterclass – at Madrid’s ECAM Forum, Spain’s newest, prestigious and still growing co-production forum which celebrates its third edition over June 9-11.
As in so much Argentine fiction, the shadow of literary giant Jorge Luis Borges falls over “Bodies of Summer,” departing from an idea, before keying in this case on its human implications.
The film is set in a not-so-distant future where death is no longer definitive. A body whose resources are exhausted can have its consciousness survive in a digital limbo, then come back in a different body. That doesn’t come free of charge, however. In “Bodies of Summer,” Rana, after 100 years as data, come back to life in a what is 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 statement as “an ambitious adaptation that blends speculative science fiction with an intimate exploration of family, mortality, and human connection,” themes also explored in “The Message.” Of that film Fund said, when Luxbox boarded sales, that filmmaking is “something profoundly human – where the stories we craft don’t imitate life but reach out to touch it.
This was also true of “Dusk Stone,” which pictures a family torn apart and driven to irrationality by the loss of their young son. In this sense, “Bodies of Summer” marks a third feature from Fund which explores a world moving between life to death, while toying with genre and knit by original, unusual narratives which fascinate their fans.
Fund broke out in 2010 with his second feature, “The Lips,” co-directed with Santiago Loza, a hit at the Cannes Festival’s Un Certain Regard strand and the semi-documentary tale of the friendship of three female doctors in an distant, impoverished rural part of Argentina, the portrait of their bonds with one another and patients announcing Fund’s central career-long concern.
“Los cuerpos del verano” (translated into English as “Bodies of Summer”), Castagnet’s literary debut, won the Saint-Nazaire MEET Young Latin American Literature Award. Following the publication of “Los mantras modernos,” Castagnet was selected for the Bogotá39 list of Latin America’s most outstanding Latin American writers under 40. In 2021, he was selected by Granta Magazine as one of the best young writers in the Spanish language.
What ‘Bodies of Summer’ Signals About RT Features’ International Ambitions
Launching RT Features in 2005, few producers anywhere outside the U.S. have so consistently lifted off by partnering with icons of U.S. independent cinema.
Teixeira broke out internationally by backing Noah Baumbach’s “Francis Ha” (2012). He went on to co-produce films 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 again, “Little Men,” 2016) while in 2014 launching with Martin Scorsese Sikelia, a film fund for new directors.
From Luca Guadagnino’s “Call Me By Your Name,” nominated for Best Picture and winner of Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2018 90th Academy Awards, Teixeira has broadened his compass, producing Eggars’ “The Lighthouse” (2019) and James Gray’s “Ad Astra” (2019) and “Armageddon Time” (2022) but also Olivier Assayas’ “Wasp Network” (2019) and Mia Hansen-Løve’s “Bergman Island” (2021). He followed up by producing – along with VideoFilmes and MACT – Walter Salles’ “I’m Still Here,” the first Brazilian Portuguese-language film by a Brazilian director to be nominated for Best Picture and to win an Academy Award in the International Feature Film category.
Teixeira’s ECAM Forum talk, one of the event’s highlights this year, catches Teixeira as RT Features celebrates 20 years and has just world premiered at the Cannes Festival both James Gray’s competition contender “Paper Tiger,” starring Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, and Miles Teller, and Chilean Dominga Sotomayor’s “La Perra” in Directors’ Fortnight.
It also catches Teixeira ever more exploring the potential of global cinema, co-producing Michael Almereyda’s “Zero K,” starring Britt Lower, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Selton Mello, Caleb Landry Jones, and Peter Saarsgard which was shot in Sao Paulo.
Teixeira is also building a production slate packed by younger international name auteurs fast consolidating as contenders to figure among the most foremost voices in international 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 Features is also in post-production on “Wolves,”directed by Rami Kodeih and inspired by the real-life collapse of Lebanon’s banking system in 2019. “Bodies of Summer” marks just the latest addition to this lineup.
