Brazilian-born director and producer Beatrix Guedes is officially expanding her Los Angeles-based arthouse film production company to the UK, formalizing a network of international collaborations that now stretches across the Atlantic and into Scandinavia.
Founded in 2017, Moonlander Studios has quietly built a slate of co-productions involving partners in the UK, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Iceland, and the United States. The London expansion marks a geographic realignment with where Beatrix says the actual work is already taking place.
“This expansion is not a shift — it’s a response to where the work is already happening,” Beatrix said.
A Slate Built on Science, Surrealism, and Female Authorship
The studio’s current projects reflect an aesthetic commitment to genre-bending narratives centered on women’s voices. Leading the slate is Crystalina, a science-fiction feature written by Beatrix Guedes and to be directed by Peter Webber, whose 2003 film Girl with a Pearl Earring earned three Academy Award nominations. Crystalina is developed in collaboration with scientists from NASA and the SETI Institute and explores humanity’s emotional response to first contact. The project was a finalist at the Tribeca Film Institute’s Sloan Fund and ranked among top projects by women filmmakers in Hollywood.
Also in the slate is The Caterpillar, a surreal tragicomedy to be shot in Prague in 2026 as a UK-Sweden-Czech Republic co-production. Beatrix is the writer and director, with Emmy Award–winning producer Cecilia Salguero heading the production alongside Téia Kane and Mike Garrod, in co-production with René Ezra from Nordisk Film and Stickling Films in Sweden, and Kevan Van Thompson – producer of Jojo Rabbit and Ballerina – as the production partner in the Czech Republic.
Two additional titles round out the international co-production slate, both UK-Sweden productions: The Whispering Garden, an arthouse drama set in 1920s London about a diplomat’s wife who secretly writes erotic fiction, and Archipelago, a Nordic noir thriller series set in Stockholm, where a nurse in a nanobiotech lab uncovers a dark network synthesizing a new dangerous drug.
From São Paulo to the Festival Circuit
Beatrix began her career as a fashion photographer and experimental filmmaker in London before founding SELVA, a production company in São Paulo. She relocated permanently to Los Angeles in 2017 to launch Moonlander Studios.
Her film Rupert, written, directed, and produced by her won Best Screenplay at the Berlin Independent Film Festival and earned nominations at Cannes Shorts, ARFF Amsterdam, Venezia Shorts, and UK Shorts. The festival recognition established Beatrix as an emerging voice in the arthouse circuit.
With operations now anchored between Los Angeles, London, and Stockholm, the independent studio is positioning itself as a cross-continental hub for auteur-driven cinema. The model combines development, production, and co-financing for projects that Beatrix describes as resisting easy classification—a portfolio built on surreal imagination, feminine complexity, and formal experimentation.