Latin America Monthly: Once There Was Brasilia

 

 

This politically charged, Afrofuturist sci-fi begins in 1959 and travels through time to present day Brasil, parodying the shortcomings of Brazilian politics while throwing a sharp jab at the country’s entrenched structural racism. Ex-convict, chain-smoking, intergalactic traveller WA4, played by Wellington Abreu, is sent on a mission to Earth to assassinate Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek (actual former president of Brazil from 1956–1961) on inauguration day of the capital Brasília. His ship malfunctions and crashes into the future, landing in 2016 in the satellite city Ceilândia – initially built to keep the poor from populating the capital with shantytowns. There, he encounters a motley crew of outer-space warriors, and together, they plan out and stage a coup against the monsters occupying the National Congress.