Miudinho Festival: We talk shop with the Co-Founder of one of Berlin’s most intriguing cultural events 

“You arrive in the morning and, until you leave at night, there is no need to go anywhere else…” That’s Miudinho Festival, in the words of Clara Citaristi, Co-Founder and Producer of the sell-out Brazilian Forró event, which takes place on a “vibrant island” in the middle of Berlin's commercial area.

A celebration of Forrò – a Brazilian genre of music and partner dance – Miudinho Festival provides a sort of peaceful, cultural idyll for three days, where attendees can enjoy everything from yoga to dance workshops to ping-pong, incredible live music concerts and DJ sets. Not forgetting delicious food… and massages, too! (Because, why not?)

What’s interesting to learn about this bustling city festival is that it’s not really like other city festivals at all. And that’s largely thanks to the venue it takes place in, Malzfabrik – an old listed malt factory that’s been turned into an incredible space for events. On its website, Malzfabrik is described as “a vibrant island with a focus on creativity, culture, environmental awareness and sustainable thinking.” And we love that idea; an intriguing gem – an island – nestled in the sprawling, rugged city of Berlin.

Below, we chat with Clara about the incredible Miudinho Festival, its fascinating history, and the lengths Clara and her team go to in putting on such a vibrant, culturally important event each year.

Let’s go 💃.

✅ Key takeaways

🌿 Choosing the right festival venue can have a huge impact on how you – and attendees – feel about your event. Clara talks passionately about their festival location – “a little green oasis in the city” – and why it was important to them to have one central location that attendees could travel to and stay all day (and night!).

🔥 “Producing a festival is an act of passion…”. We love these words from Clara and feel they really capture what organising a festival is all about. It’s a year-round project that simply cannot come to fruition if you don’t feel passionately about your end-goal.

🎟️ Clara loves how user-friendly, intuitive, and flexible Ticket Tailor is, and says one feature in particular – the ability to transfer tickets from one buyer to another – has massively reduced their workload. Our very low prices don’t go unnoticed, either 😉🙏.

Hey Clara! So – what exactly is Forrò, and what is Miudinho Festival all about?

Forrò is a brazilian genre of music and partner dance, originally from the North-East side of Brazil. Since 2006 Forrò has become increasingly popular in Europe, leading to the creation of Forrò communities and events in many countries and cities. Miudinho Festival is part of the cultural project Miudinho Forrò Berlin, which has been promoting Brazilian culture in the city since 2016. 

Thanks to regular classes and events, the local Forrò community has grown and grown over the years, leading to Miudinho Festival being born in 2022. Every year Forrozeiras all over Europe get together in Berlin for a weekend full of live music, DJ sets and dance workshops. 

Miudinho Festival is one of the few festivals collaborating with Brazil-based bands to support Brazilian culture and give more visibility to the local artists. 

Can you tell us a bit about the festival’s history?

Myself and the festival’s other Co-Founder and Producer, Ayo Barbosa, have been organising events for quite a few years. A while back we noticed that our events were getting more and more attention… essentially, we started small and kept growing. Then the pandemic came and we had to stop. We weren’t sure if and how we would come back from it. However, thanks to Ayo’s vision, the Miudinho Festival started coming to life. 

We needed a great location where we could host all the activities we had in mind without needing to move around the city. We wanted people to arrive in the morning for our dance classes, and not have any need to leave until around 4am when the concerts were over. 

Thankfully, we found Malzfabrik, a little green oasis in the city. This incredible venue – which is an old malt factory – is easy to reach with public transport and provides everything we need to run our festival – there’s a concert hall, an outside area covered by a roof, a big park with a little lake and even a sand beach. Once we had secured our venue, we just needed a great line up, and a team to make the festival happen.

Watch this short movie to get a real feel for the Miudinho Festival >

What have been some of the festival’s biggest achievements so far?

One of our proudest achievements is the fact we sold out our first lot of tickets within a few minutes for our first ever event in 2022! It was a gamble putting on such a big production without being established as a larger event – but it paid off. 

It was also an incredible feeling, on the last day of the first edition of our festival, when we realised we had made it – people showed up, the schedule went to plan, and attendees were happy and showed so much support and love throughout the weekend. 

Even now, on our way to the fourth edition, we are so touched by people’s enthusiasm in joining our festival. 

We’re sure budding festival planners would love to know… what goes into organising a festival like yours? 

One of the first crucial steps is to invest time in carrying out a ton of research to create a solid list of contacts. With time, the whole planning process gets easier and faster as you can kind of do a copy/paste of your previous events – of course, including improvements and learnings. 

When it comes to securing our artists line-up, we’re pretty lucky as Ayo has been in the Forrò scene in Brazil for a long time – which means we’re generally in direct contact with a lot of amazing bands and their managers.

Producing a festival is an act of passion first of all, as it’s a full 12-month project; looking for sponsorships, negotiating with artists, taking care of the logistics etc. And then finally the time has arrived! You are getting excited, you experience a rollercoaster of emotions, you receive so much gratitude from the participants, but you are also super stressed and sleep deprived. You swear you will never do it again, but then, as you're dismantling this year’s festival, you find yourself going through all the improvements you want to make for the next year. 

What are some of the most important aspects of festival planning to get right?

You need to have a good team with great people in key positions. Artist Care is the most sensitive one for us, as there are many bands and teachers to take care of simultaneously and each of them has their own needs. If they are happy, the stress level for the production is way lower!

Volunteers also play a crucial role in our festival – they cover so many important roles during the event, from check-in station to bartending to transportation. Good coordination and communication with them is key.

👀Tip: Read our guide to learn how to recruit amazing volunteers for your events >

What can attendees look forward to at Miudinho Festival 2025?

A weekend full of great music with bands such as Trio Dona Zefa and Forrofià, great workshops to improve their dance skills, and plenty of amazing surprises. 

Now let’s talk ticketing – we’d love to know why you chose Ticket Tailor as your ticketing partner? 

We can confess that we have tried so many ticketing platforms over the years – and can definitely say that Ticket Tailor is the best! It’s so user-friendly, intuitive, and flexible, and the customer care is brilliant and fast. We love that you can personalise every aspect of the user journey and that you have a perfect overview of all ticket sales. And all at a minimal cost!

👀Psst – find out more about Ticket Tailor’s low-cost and transparent pricing >

Which Ticket Tailor features have been particularly helpful?

It’s so easy to transfer tickets from one buyer to another, which has been very useful for us and has massively reduced our workload! We couldn’t have done this without the great customer service support from Ticket Tailor. It has been a great improvement! We also really like that you can personalise the customer journey with extra required fields, text etc. I’ve noticed that Ticket Tailor also regularly keeps updating and releasing new features, which is great. 

Happy to be of service 😌. Thanks so much for chatting with us, Clara!

Find out more about Miudinho Festival >

Looking for a feature-packed ticketing platform that can help reduce your festival planning workload? Find out more about festival ticketing with Ticket Tailor >