The (re)invention of Brazilian cinema in its dialogue with the science fiction genre

Abstract

In Brazilian cinema of the 2010s, a series of films used elements of the science fiction genre to highlight the unusual features that were permeating the Brazilian political scene. The desire to fabulate the real has highlighted historical traumas and opened space for speculations of a transgressive nature that could operate a decolonization of the imaginary and a renewal in the Brazilian cinematographic scenario. In this article, we propose to think about the implications of this move, taking into account the historical legacy of invention cinema, a term coined by the critic and director Jairo Ferreira when he studied the effervescent Brazilian cultural context of the late 1960s and early 1970s. For this analysis of Brazilian cinema in the past decade, we privileged two works by a director who stood out in this context with films that were politically daring and inventive in their aesthetic and narrative procedures, namely Branco Sai, Preto Fica (2014) and Era uma vez Brasília (2017), both directed by filmmaker Adirley Queirós. His work under construction guides a debate about the peripheral condition of our cinema and its possibilities through the bias of a fiction of the poor, expanding an aesthetic imaginary by bringing to light evidence of the historical constitution of Brazilian cinema and its legacy in the days of today.