January 2 & 3, 2027
Salvador, Brasil
About Odù
Odù is a film festival shaped by the creative inquiry of Black, Indigenous, and queer artists from around the world, situated within Salvador’s long-standing arts and culture circuit.
The festival is developed through intentional partnerships with cultural venues that carry historical significance in the city, positioning Odù within an existing creative infrastructure while expanding its reach. Programming brings internationally recognized filmmakers into shared space with emerging artists, researchers, and students, collapsing distance across experience and geography in order to engage urgent social, political, and cultural questions.
Previous editions convened over 300 participants, with artists and audiences traveling from across Latin America, the United States, Europe, and West Africa, positioning Odù as a site of international cultural exchange rooted in local context.
How We Operate
Odù is built through a people centered production model that treats access, labor, and local economies as core infrastructure. The festival is free to the public and invests directly in Salvador’s creative economy through no fee vendor markets, equitable compensation for staff and collaborators, and programming anchored in cultural sites with deep historical significance that are increasingly threatened by disinvestment and erasure.
Programming is designed to circulate beyond institutional centers, engaging peripheral neighborhoods and audiences often excluded by assumptions about taste, access, or interest. Odù approaches access as a design problem rather than an outreach initiative, structuring participation so communities are met where they already are.
By convening artists, audiences, and economies across borders, Odù facilitates the exchange of tools, knowledge, and strategies among participants, strengthening a translocal network of cultural workers engaged in sustained collaboration, shared inquiry, and long term cultural production.
What We Are Building Now
Previous editions of Odù were produced through Poto and the financial contributions of a small group of Black feminist independent artists. This model supported a high level of care, rigor, and creative freedom, while concentrating labor and financial responsibility within a small team. Following the 2023 edition, Odù entered a necessary cocoon period to reassess sustainability, as the quality and scale of production could not be maintained with the level of financial support available at the time.
In 2026, Odù is focused on building a production structure that supports the festival’s artistic ambition, scale, and labor practices. We are seeking collaborators whose skills strengthen both creative and operational capacity, including artists and storytellers working across film and visual culture, collaborators with administrative and accounting expertise, and production partners such as print houses and fabricators supporting festival materials and on-site infrastructure.
Artists may participate through invitation and open calls.
Collaborators interested in offering their skills are invited to contact the Odù team at potoglobo@gmail.com.
Alongside partnerships, Odù is currently raising $10,000 USD to support early-stage planning, collaborator fees, and production groundwork for the next edition. This phase is intended to stabilize core operations, reduce reliance on uncompensated labor, and sustain the quality and scale established in previous years.