“I’ve never shot a movie set in, say, 1900 because that’s not what I experienced. In 1977, I was nine years old and I remember something,” Kleber Mendonza Filho mentioned of his newest paintings, Secret Agent. The movie considerably opens with documentary pictures, suggesting from the outset its name for ancient reminiscence. Moreover, the textual content signifies that we’re within the Brazil of the army dictatorship, all over the carnival of 1977, as its director indicated.
Portrait of director Kleber Mendonza Filho at the set of The Secret Agent. Cannes Movie Pageant
The Secret Agent used to be introduced on the Cannes Movie Pageant, the place it received main awards, and is a contender for the 2026 Oscar in 4 classes, together with Perfect Global Movie and Perfect Image. It does not appear a twist of fate that it used to be launched lower than a yr after I am Nonetheless Right here, a sober docudrama awarded on the 2025 Academy Awards for Perfect Global Movie. In it, its director, Walter Gross sales, reconstructed the arrest, torture and homicide in 1971 of the architect Rubens Paiva, an opponent of the Brazilian dictatorship.
“I think there’s something in the air. The last ten or twelve years in Brazil have been traumatic in a way and probably exposed wounds that haven’t fully healed because my country is not good at looking at the past,” says Mendonsa Filho. “In Brazil, when the extreme right started to emerge ten years ago, I thought it was really weird and strange that they were bringing back things that were kept in a museum: words, attitudes, misogyny, homophobia, internalized racism.”
Towards forgetting
The director is relating to the federal government of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president from 2019 to 2023, whose tenure has observed main funds cuts to the general public sector, particularly training. In line with the subject to hand, he additionally dismantled the state’s reminiscence and fact techniques in regards to the repression of the Brazilian army dictatorship.
On this sense, each movies can also be observed as a creative reaction to this far-right politics. I nonetheless opted for a extra vintage dramatic naturalism, in accordance with the ebook via Marcel Rubens Paiva, the son of the principle sufferer. By contrast, Mendonca Filho undertakes in The Secret Agent to approximate Brazilian ancient reminiscence from fiction, with a daring way to more than one tones and textures that in the end weigh down labels and genres.
The Secret Agent is a dramatic political mystery, but in addition a polytonal artifact that strikes at a sluggish and meandering tempo thru social satire, black comedy, ugly, or even “fantastic” in a definite sense. Thus, the stunning scene actually used the city legend of the “hairy leg”, a euphemism used within the press on the time to steer clear of censorship when speaking about police violence towards night time passers-by in cruising grounds.
The movie thus stands as an bold portrait of the customs of the time, which has a tendency to reconstruct the collective reminiscence of Brazil from sensual cinema, which represents the naturalization of corruption and on a regular basis violence, but in addition its cultural peculiarities. The primary is detected within the lengthy opening scene on the gasoline station, the place the stress is given via the consistent presence of a corpse within the outdoor. This may be observed within the massive (and it appears regimen) collection of press releases of the carnival useless. “For a better Brazil, with less violence,” says one of the crucial characters after they toast in a later scene. The movie additionally contains homages to the cinema, theater and projectionists of the ones years, with a unique allusion to Jaws (1975), a movie that truly obsessed Mendonza Filho as a kid.
In the back of this wealthy ranking lies the filmmaker’s preliminary aesthetic choice to not make a movie “about a dictatorship” however to develop the focal point to provide the ambience of Brazil within the seventies and come with emotional reminiscences from his personal early life.
Collective and private reminiscence
The director defined that researching archival subject material from his earlier movie, the essay documentary Ghost Portraits, ready him for The Secret Agent.
Cartel of Lucius Flavius, traveler of agony. FilmAffinity
His first purpose used to be to make a mystery within the taste of the seventies, taking as references the cinema of New Hollywood and Brazilian thug movies reminiscent of Hector Babenco’s Lucio Flavio: The Agony Traveler. However the intense documentary paintings he did on previous cinemas in his homeland of Recife for that documentary took him into a much broader inventive territory hooked up to his early life reminiscences.
The director additionally returns to his earlier considerations about social violence, as already took place in his movies Doña Clara and Bakurau (the latter co-directed with Julian Dornelles). He printed to him the script for Secret Agent, which Mendonza Filho have been writing for 3 years: his pals learn the drafts and in an instant instructed him that his tale in regards to the Brazilian dictatorship in 1977 obviously resonated with Bolsonaro’s Brazil.
As an example, the disruption of public upper training within the movie is personified via a corrupt businessman hooked up to the army regime. The nature visits the protagonist’s college with the purpose of subjecting it to cuts and layoffs, thus privatizing its analysis for the good thing about its personal corporate. The classist and racist disagreement that generates the structural inequality between the south, which is extra evolved and wealthy, and the north of Brazil may be proven, a social fracture that looks in different scenes.
The good judgment of the previous additionally dialogues with recent Brazil in alternative ways. The nature of Doña Sebastiana (Tania Maria), an previous lady who takes in refugees and dissidents persecuted via the army regime, used to be impressed via one thing Mendonza Filho found out all over the Bolsonaro generation. That one thing used to be in the preferred unrest, within the on a regular basis conversations and in the truth that other folks, particularly in Recife, sought to unite once more to assist others.
“I’m not going to talk to you about this,” Armando’s son says after admitting he slightly recalls what took place to his father whilst fleeing the repression of the Brazilian dictatorship. In contrast to different international locations the place the crimes of earlier dictatorships had been prosecuted and the reminiscence of them faced, it’s, for Mendonza Filho, a correct description of the connection that a lot of his compatriots nonetheless have with the “too unpleasant” previous.
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