Once There Was Brasília review – sci-fi odyssey into Brazil's murky politics

An intergalactic refugee travels through time to modern-day Brazil in an eerie tale that has real-life corruption at its heart

Brazilian director Adirley Queiros here cobbles together something comparable, though far more lo-fi, to Wong Kar-wai's 2046: a haunted, backwards-looking sci-fi assembled from textures of the past, which encourages you to pick through the wreckage of political ideology it strews in its wake. Wellington Abreu plays WA4, a Mad Max-style refugee from outer space who, as punishment for an illegal land occupation on his own planet, is sent to Earth to assassinate the real-life former Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek on the inauguration day of the capital city, Brasilia, in 1961. But his ship crash-lands in the present day, in the satellite city of Ceilandia, an overflow enclave for the dispossessed that represents how the country's utopia has been thwarted.