The aim of this piece is to provide a brief overview of Brazilian science fiction cinema, identifying its main trends, challenges, and ‘shapes of apparition’. It will thus draw a timeline that starts in the late 1940s and ends in the late 2000s. In addition, this overview will attempt to investigate some basic sources, obstacles, and influences affecting Brazilian science fiction cinema, from its rise to the present.

In ‘An Atlas of World Cinema’ (2006), Dudley Andrew proposes a different approach to contemporary world cinema, free from the normative standards of a classical historiography of film. As an alternative to a linear or orbital approach, with ‘peripheral’ areas and ‘cores,’ Andrew, clearly inspired by Franco Moretti's Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (1999), suggests a new model for film studies, based on the logic of an atlas. In this manner, a film researcher can carry out a mapping of contemporary world cinema, and focus on its politics, demographics, linguistics, etc. Each example provides a possible research program by Andrew. He also suggests that the metaphor of ‘waves’ should replace traditional ‘family trees’ based on national cinematographies. Using the ‘wave’—rather than the ‘tree’— approach to categorization, film history research abandons its traditionally rigid character, and, instead, embraces hybridization and recognizes a multiplicity of interrelated and overlapping influences contributed by regional and national cinemas. Lúcia Nagib seizes on the usefulness of the concept of ‘waves,’ to propose a definition of world cinema as a true ‘cinema from the world’—with no center, beginning or end, a global process in constant movement and circulation, which establishes flexible geographies (2007, 39). This positive, inclusive, and democratic concept allows for various theoretical approaches (40). This is the spirit of this research, the will to look for science fiction in darker and deeper cinematographic spots. In this sense, Brazilian science fiction cinema has also been influenced by ‘cinematic waves,’ particularly Northern waves.

First, we must recover a pioneering essay written by Brazilian writer and literary critic Fausto Cunha: ‘Science Fiction in Brazil: a sparsely inhabited planet’ (1976, 5–20), the starting point for our research. Cunha's metaphor of Brazilian science fiction literature as a semi-deserted planet could also be applied to the study of science fiction in Brazilian cinema.