There is a considerable distance between dreaming and having the means to sustain a dream. Funk, Aly Muritiba’s new feature film, seems particularly interested in this space: the place where desire, money, identity, and survival intertwine.
In competition at the Première Brasil section of the 2026 Rio Film Festival, the musical drama follows Sabrina (Duda Santos), a young woman from Morro dos Prazeres who wants to make funk her life. Daughter of Priscila (MC Neném), a funk singer who has already experienced her own moment of recognition, Sabrina knows where she intends to go. What she doesn’t yet know is how much of herself will be demanded to remain on stage.
Before any success, however, there is life. Sabrina needs to work, pay the bills, endure insults, face racism, and still find the energy to believe that someone will notice her talent and offer her an opportunity. There is something very true in this dimension of the film: dreaming also costs money. For those who are not born surrounded by advantages, it is not enough to possess talent. It is necessary to be able to sustain it.
“You know what I want? I want to celebrate my freedom.”
This freedom also extends to the body and the right to desire. By entering the world of explicit funk music, the film finds one of its most interesting provocations. Sabrina reclaims a sexual language that is accepted naturally when it comes from men, but constantly policed when it comes from women. “Explicit funk is freedom, but also love,” she says. Pleasure and affection don’t have to be on opposite sides.
But this freedom constantly encounters limits. Sabrina faces racism at work, questions the pay gap between men and women, and lives with police violence and other powers that determine how marginalized bodies can move around.That’s why the Rio that appears in Funk interested me so much.
The film doesn’t reduce the city to the favela or the baile funk, much less to the postcard image. There’s beach, soccer, workers, parties, friends, and a city lived by those who need to cross it every day.
The cinematography is one of the aspects that most catches the eye. At various moments, it took me to a certain Brazilian visual imaginary of the 2000s, something between the energy of City of God and the popular aesthetics of Hurricane 2000. Not as a copy, but through the texture, the lights, and the way of finding beauty in that universe. The soundtrack and editing help maintain this pulse.
This is directly related to an idea defended by the team: not simply making a film about funk, but a film with funk. The difference is important. The genre isn’t just a subject. It’s in the costumes, the choreography, the language, the bodies, and the very aesthetic construction of the film. Muritiba even compared his creative process to the use of samples, gathering references from photographs, music videos, and home recordings to build something unique and real.
Duda Santos carries this energy well. Her Sabrina is hungry to get to the next level. She wants the stage, money, recognition, and freedom. And it’s precisely when she starts to achieve all of that that the film finds its most interesting contradiction.
By replacing her friend Raíssa (Lellê), who managed her career, with a manager capable of taking her to another level, Sabrina gains structure, reach, and a more polished image. But this polishing begins to look like sanitization. The more the industry realizes her commercial potential, the more it tries to trim precisely what made her unique.
Sabrina finally manages to be seen. The question becomes: who are they seeing when they look at her?
Raíssa may be an inexperienced businesswoman, who makes mistakes and learns in practice how that market works, but she knows Sabrina before she knows the product. There is something interesting even in the affective sense of the word “amateur”: she is there also because she loves her friend. The subsequent professionalization offers efficiency, but it comes at a different price.
At home, there is also the difficult relationship with Priscila. Sabrina demands a mother that she feels she didn’t have, while Priscila observes her daughter’s ambition with the experience of someone who has already known some version of that dream and its disappointments. Between the two, there is pride, resentment, admiration, and love, even when neither knows exactly how to demonstrate it.
But perhaps Sabrina needs to travel this entire path to finally understand what she couldn’t see at the beginning.
She spends a good part of the film looking ahead. The future means success, money, stage, and recognition; the past seems to represent everything she needs to overcome. Until she achieves her dream and discovers that it wasn’t exactly as she had imagined.
You have to arrive to realize what was left behind.
Thus, Funk ceases to be just a story about a young woman from the periphery who wants to succeed in music. It is also a film about belonging and about the risk of conquering a space that demands, in exchange, the abandonment of what made you get there.
Sabrina spends so much time looking for a better version of herself in the future that she almost loses sight of who she always was. Her journey is precisely about recovering that identity—her friends, her mother, the favela, her language, her desire—without it meaning giving up on moving forward.
Because perhaps the true freedom that Sabrina seeks isn’t just about getting on stage. It’s about being able to occupy it without having to disappear.
You can find Funk on Festival do Rio.
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