Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto, 2025) marks a second of consolidation in one among fresh Brazilian cinema’s maximum constant careers.
Since his early quick motion pictures equivalent to Chilly Tropics (Recife Frio, 2009), the filmmaker has advanced a singular taste filled with film references that tantalisingly falls someplace between arthouse and style movie. Those characteristics succeed in new heights of self-awareness and formal freedom in The Secret Agent, which has been nominated for 4 Academy Awards, together with absolute best image, and absolute best actor for Wagner Moura.
The movie belongs to a up to date wave of Brazilian productions revisiting the army dictatorship (1964-1985), together with Walter Salles’s Oscar-winning I’m Nonetheless Right here (Ainda Estou Aqui, 2024), and actor/director Wagner Moura’s Marighella (2019). But those motion pictures do greater than reconstruct ancient episodes: they procedure, thru cinema, an unresolved trauma whose reverberations proceed to form Brazil’s political provide.
The movie’s Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho.
Marco Barada / Alamy
Some of the options that makes The Secret Agent, set predominantly in 1977, in particular compelling on this regard is its remedy of universities, as battlegrounds the place reminiscence, energy and democracy collide.
The movie’s major persona Armando, performed via Oscar-nominated Moura, isn’t, in reality, a undercover agent and has no glaring hyperlinks to opposition actions. He’s an educational pressured into hiding after clashing with giant trade pursuits aligned with the authoritarian regime who need to get their fingers on his analysis.
Brazilian thinker Marilena Chauí has spoken of her private enjoy of those darkish days in Brazil portrayed in Mendonça Filho’s movie. Chauí returned from France in 1969 together with her PhD in hand, simply after the Brazilian army suspended maximum civil rights within the nation, resulting in a state hunt for “communists” and the intensification of torture and censorship.
Chauí describes the presence on campus of mysterious army figures with the ability to rent and hearth and “disappear” workforce and scholars who have been adversarial to the regime. The presence of secret brokers disguised as scholars to watch professors and scholars in school rooms in public universities was once common.
In The Secret Agent, Armando has not too long ago returned from the College of Leeds in Britain. He and the world analysis staff he has arrange on the Federal College of Pernambuco in Brazil’s north-east fall beneath the scrutiny of Henrique Ghirotti, an industrialist from Sao Paulo.
Armando overtly questions Ghirotti’s ethics and issues to a battle of passion: how can a rich industrialist justify taking executive investment destined for universities for his personal personal pursuits? Armando’s sour response to such an open display of corruption is sufficient for him to transform a marked guy. A lot of the movie portrays Armando’s try to conceal from Ghirotti and the corrupt regulation enforcement and paid assassins he has at his disposal.
This dramatic state of affairs illuminates no longer most effective the surveillance and repression universities continued beneath the dictatorship, but in addition broader patterns of corruption. The spider’s internet connecting army pursuits with giant trade that tired Brazil’s financial momentum during the Nineteen Seventies, is a historical past this is most effective now totally coming to gentle.
The movie’s center of attention on educational freedom carries fresh resonance. Mendonça Filho wrote The Secret Agent all the way through the presidency of far-right Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022), whose lengthy record of adversarial measures integrated assaults on public training. Between 2019 and 2022, federal universities misplaced 14.4% in their finances, and via 2022 investment had fallen underneath 2013 ranges.
Walter Salles’ I’m Nonetheless Right here explores an identical territory about Brazil’s army dictatorship.
Archives of repression
The Secret Agent additionally speaks to renewed world debates across the privatisation of analysis, highbrow assets, and the political vulnerability of universities, an increasing number of considered as hotbeds of leftist sedition. Mendonça Filho’s movie means that authoritarianism assaults society no longer most effective thru violence however throughout the destruction, privatisation, or silencing of information manufacturing itself.
The industrialist Ghirotti takes enjoyment of informing Armando that he’ll be recommending that his analysis staff is close down and the paintings transferred to the College of São Paulo, with whom Ghirotti has doubtful hyperlinks. Ghirotti questions the usefulness of any analysis being performed within the north-east that speaks to nationwide pursuits, in particular when Canadians are operating at the similar tech and Brazil will pay for international science and generation.
Mendonça Filho, who’s from Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, has been very vocal in regards to the ingrained prejudice of many from the wealthier and whiter southern states in the case of the north, which is brushed aside as backward. It’s telling that during The Secret Agent Armando’s world analysis staff first took form in Leeds, given an identical prejudices are regularly held in regards to the north of England.
In a subplot set within the provide day, a bunch of scholars paintings on an oral historical past challenge involving tape recordings made via dissidents all the way through the dictatorship, together with Armando. Considered one of them, Flávia, travels to Pernambuco to seek advice from Armando’s now middle-aged son.
A tender black mom with circle of relatives within the north-east, residing within the outer edge of São Paulo, Flávia, typifies the brand new, extra numerous college scholar frame, made imaginable via hard-won affirmative motion tasks and the growth of the general public college community.
In The Secret Agent, it’s Flávia and scholars like her who’ve inherited no longer most effective the archives of repression, but in addition the potential for reworking wisdom right into a type of democratic restore.
Anchored via Wagner Moura’s compelling efficiency, Mendonça Filho’s movie connects the struggles of the previous to the interest and braveness of a brand new era. In so doing, The Secret Agent powerfully underscores cinema’s talent no longer most effective to entertain, but in addition to remove darkness from, query and encourage.
