Director: Afonso Poyart
Brazil's near-future underworld gets a jolt of speed and steel in Bionic, a sports-crime thriller that imagines what happens when prosthetic technology turns Paralympic competition into a battleground for money and power.
What is Bionic about?
Maria has spent years chasing the same finish line as her sister, only the sister already crossed it first, and now wears bionic legs built for a level of competition Maria can only watch from the sidelines. Robotics has rewritten the rules of Paralympic sport in this version of Brazil: the right hardware can turn an athlete into a headline, a sponsorship deal, or a target. To close the gap, Maria starts making calls she shouldn't, meeting people who deal in stolen tech and favors that always come due later. Director Afonso Poyart keeps the camera close to the mechanics of movement, the whir of servos, the strain of a body pushing past what it was built for, so the action sequences double as character study. As Maria gets pulled deeper into a circuit of underground fixers and black-market engineers, the line between training for glory and running for survival keeps shifting under her feet.
Cast & crew
Jessica Córes carries Maria's drive and desperation without overplaying either, and Bruno Gagliasso and Gabz fill out a supporting cast that treats the criminal underworld as lived-in rather than cartoonish.
Context & significance
Bionic arrived in 2024 as part of a small but growing wave of genre films using disability sport and adaptive technology as a lens for stories about ambition, inequality, and the price of competing at the top. Its Brazilian setting also brings a distinct regional flavor to a subgenre usually built around American or European backdrops, grounding the speculative tech in favela economics and street-level hustling rather than corporate boardrooms.
Where & how to watch
Bionic streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, in a Farsi-first interface built for Iranian households abroad. All you need is a free K-Time account login to start watching; there's no separate step beyond that, and the same login carries across every device in the house.