We tend to act like geek culture is an American thing, with some branches in Japan and the United Kingdom. But that’s a gross oversimplification – if you look hard enough, you can find awesome science fiction, fantasy and more all over the world. A great example is Bacurau, a Brazilian movie that is hitting screens in the States this week. Set in the country’s rural wilderness, it follows the residents of a small town thrown into supernatural chaos after the elderly matriarch passes away. We liked it so much it inspired us to take a deeper dive into South American sci-fi and fantasy movies, and here are 11 you should check out.
The Cleaner
We’ve got pandemics on the brain right now, which makes Peruvian director Adrián Saba’s The Cleaner seem very relevant. The titular character is Eusebio, who has the unenviable task of disposing and sterilizing the remains of people who perish from a lung infection that is ravaging Lima. When he’s cleaning the apartment of a single mother, he discovers her son hiding in a closet and has to figure out what to do with him. Because people under 20 are immune from the plague, the boy begins to accompany Eusebio on his rounds, giving us a chilling but touching view into a possible coronavirus-ravaged future.
Brief Story from the Green Planet
We don’t need to lecture you about how one of the strengths of science fiction is its ability to reflect the present day in allegorical ways. For a great example, award-winning Argentinean movie Brief Story from the Green Planet is worth a watch. Three friends from Buenos Aires travel back to their hometown after one of their grandmothers dies, only to discover that the old woman was being taken care of by an alien who now needs to be returned where they came from. This kicks off a tender, charming road movie that is unlike anything else you’ve ever watched.
The 5th Power
The oldest film on this list, Alberto Pieralisi’s 1962 drama about a subliminal broadcast signal launched by a foreign country that turns the Brazilian populace into deranged maniacs. It bears some similarities to John Carpenter’s They Live, from a few decades later, but definitely has its own vibe. Only a few people who don’t watch TV or listen to the radio are left unaffected, and they have to figure out what is going on as chaos rises around them. Wildly, two years later Brazil would see a military coup sparked in many ways by the media, proving that sci-fi is often a good predictor of the future.
White Out, Black In
Issues of class and race are prevalent throughout South America, and this smart, low-budget drama uses technology as a lens to examine the forces at play. Set in Ceilandia, a satellite city set up outside Brasilia to keep undesirables from moving into the capital, White Out, Black In follows a pair of men named Marquim and Sartana who have lost limbs as a result of state-sponsored violence. When a time traveler from the future to prevent an apocalyptic event linked to the two men, things get even more complicated. Director Adirley Queirós is better known for documentaries, and brings that approach to speculative fiction here.
Infection
Making movies in countries that are politically unstable is a unique challenge, but sometimes the results are extremely compelling. 2019’s Infection was lensed during a period of resource shortages as the Maduro administration began to collapse, and director Flavio Pedota and his crew had to improvise to tell their zombie outbreak story during the chaos. The end result is brisk, clever and vicious. Its political content got Infection banned in its home country, but it won rave reviews abroad.
Phase 7
Nicolas Goldbart’s odd black comedy might not seem terribly futuristic at first, but fans of movies like Shaun Of The Dead will enjoy Phase 7. When the apartment building that young couple Coco and Pipi have just moved into gets quarantined in the midst of a pandemic that is sweeping Quito, things rapidly begin to escalate as neighbors become less friendly. Our heroes are simply not cut out to survive in a rapidly collapsing world, and things get both unexpectedly funny and unexpectedly gory in equal measure as conditions worsen.
Orbiter 9
Colombian-Spanish co-production Orbiter 9 is a deeply grim story of resource scarcity in deep space. Lead character Helena has lived her entire life on the Orbiter 9 station, but with oxygen levels low her parents commit suicide so she can continue surviving. When an astronaut from Earth arrives to repair her station, things quickly get weird as we learn that Helena isn’t in space at all, but rather part of a long-term isolation experiment that is designed to see if humans will be able to mentally survive the journey to a habitable planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. It’s a well-acted, tense little moral drama that’s well worth tracking down.
The Others
When an ordinary systems engineer picks up a strange disease in the Amazon jungle, it causes a layer of bacterial plaque to form on his skin that soon starts to bud off and produce replicas of himself. Only one problem: each of these copies is homicidally insane and producing clones of their own. This sci-fi horror flick from Colombian director Oscar Campo is a dystopian take on the zombie apocalypse, with our protagonist losing hold of his identity as his copies tear society apart around him. There was a little international buzz around this one, and it’s a very accessible watch.
Anomaly
Directed by Sergio Vargas Paz, Anomaly is a fascinating Bolivian sci-fi flick about how memory and technology intersect and corrupt one another. Widowed artist Maria Ana spends every day at Memories Corp, a company that allows people to relive their most important past moments in rich, contemporary detail. But when a bug in the system wipes all of her memories, something very strange happens – a divergent timeline, where her husband still lives, is created. The question then becomes how far she will go to recapture him, and whether their relationship will still be the same.
Videophilia (and Other Viral Syndromes)
This wild, lurid conspiracy thriller was Peru’s submission to the Academy Awards in 2015, but it didn’t secure a nomination. Too bad, because it’s a very unique and interesting flick. Director Juan Daniel F. Molero introduces us to a pair of young people who are deeply internet poisoned. After Luz and Junior meet online and start producing amateur adult videos, the glitches and distortions in their clips start infecting the world around them. Hallucinatory, paranoid, and deeply weird, this is a unique and unsettling film that’s almost impossible to take in with a single viewing.
Goodbye Dear Moon
When uncontrollable weather systems ravage the Earth, a group of scientists raise an unlikely hypothesis: since the tides are affected by the moon, why not just blow it up? What’s the worst that could happen? This absurd 2004 sci-fi comedy sees the Argentine government pursue a quixotic quest to destroy the Earth’s only satellite in defiance of the international community, only for the three-person mission to be abandoned halfway through and left to fend for themselves. Throw in a mysterious force emitted by the moon itself and you’ve got an odd, whimsical adventure that will keep you guessing from beginning to end.
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