O agente secreto (The Secret Agent, 2025), the latest feature by Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, has been billed as a political thriller, but is better described as a stylish and frolicsome romp through Brazilian and North American film history that celebrates all that cinema is capable of. While beholden to the narrative of deception that propels many conventional thrillers, the film smoothly navigates an array of genres (the Western, noir, horror, even the family story) while nodding toward John Carpenter, Brian De Palma, and Martin Scorsese, as well as Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and other US horror films of the 1970s. Set in 1977, during the military dictatorship, The Secret Agent casts its tale of corruption and repression as a black comedy, presenting a strange and discomforting story in which nothing is what it seems, and in which the many subplots and detours matter more than the story’s central conceit, which revolves around a researcher called Marcelo (an alias; his real name is Armando) on the run from hired hitmen. In a metanarrative set in the present, two university students transcribe audiotapes that record the story of Marcelo/Armando—one of several ways in which The Secret Agent engages with the notion of the archive and links the past to the present.Brazilian star Wagner Moura, in his first on-screen Portuguese-language role in eight years, plays Marcelo/Armando, who returns to his hometown of Recife to go into hiding. There, he connects with a vast array of people, among them Seu Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), his father-in-law, who has been taking care of Marcelo’s young son, Fernando, after the death of Marcelo’s wife, and who works as a projectionist in the São Luiz cinema, a key location in the film. The rest of the cast includes the charismatic Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), who operates a shelter for refugees, where Marcelo can hide; Elza (Maria Fernanada Cândido), who protects Marcelo and records their conversations; Euclides (Robério Diógenes), a corrupt police chief; Bobbi (Gabriel Leone), a hitman; and Hans (Udo Kier), a Jewish tailor, whose scars bear witness to past atrocities. This cast of Altmanesque proportions comes with skillfully sketched backstories, making for a memorable ensemble performance that paints a vivid portrait of a society at a crossroads and reeling from oppression.In another nod to the 1970s, The Secret Agent is shot in anamorphic wide-screen format with a saturated color scheme that emphasizes bright yellow and orange, underscoring the scorching heat during Recife’s carnival season, and featuring a soundtrack that is a mash-up of Brazilian carnival hits with American pop classics such as Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now” (1976), heard on the car radio as Marcelo hastily makes his getaway. Mendonça Filho puts a premium on using historic locations such as the post office and paying attention to details and objects—especially the jetton-operated public phone—which make the past come alive. At times, these details take on a whimsical dimension that calls to mind the films of Wes Anderson—as, for instance, in a scene where a telegram is delivered—exemplifying the subtle humor that underlies a rather morbid tale. This is a story where things are never what they seem, and where nothing ever quite goes as expected. The surreal and the all too real appear side by side.The Secret Agent is the first period piece by a director who has earned a reputation for taking on some of Brazil’s most pressing problems—extreme inequality, the legacy of colonialism and slavery, and reckless urban development—through a unique mixture of realism and touches of horror and the supernatural in previous films. A journalist by training, Mendonça Filho began as a film critic and programmer at Recife’s top alternative cinema, Cinema da Fundação Joaquim Nabuco. Alongside his features, his filmography includes more than a dozen shorts, covering a wide array of subjects, genres, and forms that range from documentaries to experimental and fiction films. In the early 2000s, he founded CinemaScópio Productions, together with his wife, Emilie Lesclaux. Lesclaux has served as producer of almost all of Mendonça’s films, but the company’s portfolio also includes a number of impressive recent Brazilian films. As The Secret Agent amply demonstrates, Mendonça Filho is extremely well versed in US cinema, but he also has a strong appreciation of Brazilian film history—particularly the work of Eduardo Coutinho and Nelson Pereira dos Santos, but also Glauber Rocha and the Cinema Novo in general. The love of cinema in all its diversity and complexity is the topic of his first feature, the 2008 documentary Crítico (Critic), which focuses on the relationship between filmmakers and critics. The seventy-eight-minute film combines short excerpts from personal conversations with more than sixty film critics, directors, and actors that Mendonça Filho recorded over nine years at international film festivals, premieres, and elsewhere.1The Secret Agent is Mendonça Filho’s fourth feature film, after O som ao redor (Neighboring Sounds), which premiered at Rotterdam in 2012, Aquarius (2016), and Bacurau (codirected with Juliano Dornelles, 2019), as well as the essay film Retratos fantasmas (Pictures of Ghosts, 2023), all three of which first screened at Cannes. With the exception of Bacurau, which takes place in the hinterlands of Pernambuco, all are set in the director’s hometown of Recife. This regional emphasis counters the long domination of the Brazilian film and media industry by the Southwest, for decades the center of the nation’s arts and media—particularly São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Like Mendonça Filho’s preceding films, The Secret Agent celebrates the culture of Recife and Pernambuco—including the region’s specific carnival traditions, music, accent, and architecture—while taking stabs at Southerners.Although these four films are thematically diverse, they share one feature: they all begin with a series of black-and-white photos that relate to the respective stories they tell, revealing the director’s commitment to archival work. In his introduction to the collection of the screenplays of his first three features, the director laments how a certain class is willing to tolerate or even profit from a repression of the past, “an ‘amnesty’ built on conscious amnesia, the Brazil of ‘let’s move on, let’s not think about bad things, no!,’ the country of ‘never despair’ and ‘old things belong in a museum.’”2 Here, the director echoes the narrator of Bernardo Kucinski’s 2011 novel K, who describes the period of the dictatorship and its aftermath as “Alzheimer’s on a national scale … the result of the way the nation has collectively forgotten its dead.”3 In interviews about The Secret Agent, Mendonça Filho has repeatedly described the new film as an antidote to any form of “auto-amnesia.”4 In our conversation, he further emphasizes the significance of the archive as a potential guardian of the historical truth. Not coincidentally, then, this film, as well as Neighboring Sounds, is dedicated to his mother, Joselice Jucá, a historian whose private and professional life also takes center stage in the first part of Pictures of Ghosts.A recurring theme in Mendonça Filho’s work, also important in Neighboring Sounds, Aquarius, and Pictures of Ghosts, has been the verticalization of Recife. Over the last four decades, rampant real-estate development has turned single- and multifamily homes into apartment towers built for wealthy domestic and foreign investors, displacing the previous inhabitants and completely changing the look of the city. As Neighboring Sounds underscores, the money that made this boom possible was earned generations ago in the sugar mills, where first enslaved people and then indentured workers labored under horrific conditions. His films show how the extreme economic inequality that has marked Brazil for centuries continues to exist to this day, making for deeply fraught class and race relationships, a reminder of which is offered up by Fernando in the coda of The Secret Agent.What the more horizontal and once vibrant downtown area of Recife looked like can be gleaned from the essay film Pictures of Ghosts. This part of the city was once home to numerous glorious picture palaces—among them the São Luiz—most of which have been turned into shopping malls, churches, or, as is revealed in The Secret Agent, a blood bank. Pictures of Ghosts is a very personal film—as is The Secret Agent, as Mendonça Filho explains below—for which the director drew on his own personal archive of images and sounds recorded since the 1990s, including his short Homem de Projeção (codirected with Elissama Cantalice, 1992), about sixty-five-year-old projectionist Alexandre Moura, who at the time had worked at the Art Palácio for forty-one years. Shot on VHS and Super 8, the short shows Alexandre at work in the projection booth, surrounded by virtually the same equipment that Seu Alexandre works with in The Secret Agent. “The projectionist works hard,” Moura explains, “but nobody looks at him.” In The Secret Agent, Seu Alexandre is a crucial character, and the São Luiz becomes the location of decisive turns in the plot.5 Its storied history is worth recounting. Opened in 1952, the cinema enjoyed a continuous run until its closure in 2007, then was modernized and reopened under different ownership two years later, until substantial water damage shut it down again in 2023. Disturbed by this second closure, Mendonça Filho wrote an open letter to the government of the State of Pernambuco inquiring about the cinema’s future. The São Luiz finally reopened in November 2024.6 Fittingly, The Secret Agent had its Brazilian premiere there on September 10, 2025.That premiere was preceded by the one in Cannes, in May 2025, where The Secret Agent won awards for Best Director and Best Actor (for Wagner Moura), as well as the FIPRESCI Prize and the Art House Cinema Award, making it the film with the most awards at Cannes last year, and Mendonça Filho’s most decorated film to date. The winner of two Golden Globes, The Secret Agent has been nominated for four Academy Awards. This critical success underscores the special moment Brazilian cinema is currently enjoying. Building on Walter Salles’s Academy Award–winning Ainda estou aqui (I’m Still Here) and Petra Costa’s remarkable documentary Apocalipse nos Trópicos (Apocalypse in the Tropics), both of which premiered at Venice in 2024, other recent Brazilian titles of note include Gabriel Mascaro’s O último azul (The Blue Trail), winner of the 2025 Grand Jury Prize in Berlin, as well as A melhor mãe do mundo (The Best Mother in the World, 2025), by Anna Muylaert, Motel Destino (2024), by Karim Aïnouz, and Nele Wohlatz’s Dormir de olhos abertos (Sleep with Your Eyes Open, 2024), produced by CinemaScópio. This wave of international recognition represents an impressive rebound for the Brazilian film industry after former president Jair Bolsonaro had completely gutted it and viciously targeted Brazilian filmmakers, making him a person whose name Mendonça Filho refuses even to pronounce, as he explains in the following interview. Under the current president, Lula, by contrast, these formerly targeted artists, including Mendonça Filho, have been recognized through invitations to present their films in Brasilia. In our interview, the director addresses this recognition as well as the importance of his film(s) being collected by national and international archives, making them available to a large public, and becoming part of a wider collective memory.This interview was conducted via Zoom on August 22, 2025. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.Interviewer’s Note: I want to thank Kleber Mendonça Filho for taking time out of a busy schedule, and Ryan Alves Rocha for his work as my research assistant at Dartmouth.
Gerd Gemünden (Thu,) studied this question.