By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

To the point: Adirley Queirós is helping reinvent the “Sci-fi” genre with Once There Was Brasilia. This is by no means, however, a  statement that gives Queirós film the qualification of a “masterpiece”: some scenes feel overly long, and one gets the sense that an equally powerful work could’ve been made in approximately 70 minutes of duration, against the 100 minutes which drag a little bit too much, even for the most seasoned, slow-cinema cinephile lovers. But there is a significant gesture in the political realm that the Brazilian filmmaker articulates perfectly, in this universe of post-apocalyptic intergalactic time travelers which fail to assassinate president Kubitschek, landing in 2016 Ceilandia.