Recife is a city in the northeast of Brazil, which has always been known for its beaches and Carnaval and ability to produce famous footballers, but nowadays it is the director Kleber Mendonça Filho who has been carrying the name of the city around the world, not only by basing a number of his films in the tropical locale, but by continually cleaning up at film festivals and awards seasons.
The Secret Agent has been making a big splash on the circuit since it premiered at Cannes last year, where it won Best Director for Kleber Mendonça Filho, Best Actor for Wagner Moura, and the International Critics’ Prize (FIPRESCI). Going on to feature prominently at Australian film festivals and TIFF , the film has just won Best Motion Picture – Non-English Language at the Golden Globes and was nominated for Best Motion Picture – Drama, while Wagner Moura won Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama. The Oscars temperature is high!
Moura plays Marcelo, a man out of place, on the run, and coming home. He’s a handsome university professor who comes up against a research hierarchy and its vested commercial interests, and is taunted for his long hair and left-leaning ways. In 1977 Brazil, when the film is set, that doesn’t just mean having a bit of a row in a canteen and penning a passive aggressive op-ed in the student newspaper, that means your life can be on the line.
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Screenplay by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Produced by Emilie Lesclaux
Coproduced by Nathanaël Karmitz, Elisha Karmitz, Fionnuala Jamison, Olivier Barbier, Leontine Petit, Erik Glijnis, Fred Burle, Sol Bondy
Executive Producer Brent Travers
Cinematography Evgenia Alexandrova
Editing Eduardo Serrano & Matheus Farias
Music Tomaz Alves Souza & Mateus Alves
Premiered at Cannes Film Festival 2025.
Starring Wagner Moura, Maria Fernanda Candido, Gabriel Leone, Carlos Francisco, Alice Carvalho, Roberio Diogenes, Hermila Guedes, Igor De Araujo, Italo Martins, Laura Lufesi, Udo Kier, Roney Villela, Isabél Zuaa and Udo Kier
Brazil lived under a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, people went missing and death on the streets was normal. Marcelo arrives in Recife during the biggest party of the year -Carnaval week, so costumes and music are everywhere, but so is the abscence of due process, and its another excuse for the corrupt police to not worry about dead bodies murders and even engage in some of their own disappearing acts.
Marcelo is looking to get back his young son, who is currently living with his late wife’s parents for safety reasons, and his late mother’s identity papers, who he never really knew. He’s looking for a passport and to get out the country, and he’s taken on a new identity with the help of a colourful underground alliance that is helping people survive under the oppressive regime. It’s a fast paced political thriller and a sociological and historical study of the time and the city, of class and money and education. It’s also funny and tragic and sweltering, with rhythm and music and the cacophony of sounds of Brazil.
When asked about setting a film in the time of the military dictatorship Mendonça Filho said the film was about finding the logic of the time rather than what makes sense later on.
“Everytime I told people the film would be set in 1977,” he said, “the first word that comes out is “dictatorship.” Which is fine, but in Brazilian cinema, and Argentinian cinema as well, there is a subgenre of the dictatorship movie. The challenge was to make a film about the logic of that time without ticking all the boxes of the dictatorship movie. I’m not against those films. In fact, we just had a very strong and beautiful film in Brazilian cinema, I’m Still Here, by Walter Salles, which did wonders for many young people who were not even aware of that moment in history. But with this film, it’s very much about the atmosphere, the fumes. I’m interested in the logic of things — the logic of Brazil, or the logic of being in love with films. Here I wanted to capture the logic of the period.”
When asked about the specific year 1977, Mendonça Filho went on to say its all about textured memories, and how politically we’re heading backwards.
“I think it’s the first year I can actually remember, for a number of reasons,” he said. “There was a family crisis, my mother’s health situation, which led to my young uncle, Ronaldo, taking my brother and me away from the problems. Suddenly we were at the cinema all the time. It was a moment of intense applied filmgoing for reasons I only found out about years later. The films from that moment helped me establish a memory of 1977. If I had made a film about 1877, it would have been a very different process of research. But I remember the smells of 1977, I remember the texture of the time, how Brazil felt. It’s been 50 years, so a lot has changed, but ironically, in the last 10 years, it feels like we have gone back in time in terms of how society behaves. I observed it in Brazil and it’s happening now in the U.S., a certain theater of the absurd. It looks like justice is being served, but justice is being played like in a theatrical performance, and it’s a really scary thing. People behave in a theatrical way because they’re supposed to play roles, because somebody told them they had to.”
The film is layered with flash forwards to the present day and university researchers who are trawling through the now antiquated cassette tapes that conversation with Marcelo were recorded on. Some of the films most dramatic turn of events are shown just through quick visual snatches of newspaper clippings in an archive from which the historians are trying to piece together the story. It’s an interesting way to explore memory and legacy, journalism and official records, family lore and structured testimony, and which in the end is closer to the truth.
Both the director and the star fell fell out of favour with political powers in Brazil when former president Jair Bolsonaro was in charge. Mendonca Filho was vocal with his criticisms of the regime and was definitely pushed back on, and Moura directed a feature which was not allowed to be released. They both credit their shared problems with bringing them together and helping the film take shape.
“We had been trying to work together for a number of years,” said Mendonça Filho. “I’ve always been curious about Wagner, not only as an actor but as a person. We’ve become good friends now, but it started when we shared some tough times as Brazilian artists from the left, and we kind of supported each other without knowing each other very well. Wagner’s most famous role is as this tough policeman in Elite Squad (2007) in the favelas of Rio, and it’s a very violent film. I thought of it almost as a challenge to create a very relatable man, a classic hero type but also a nonviolent character who says a couple of times that he doesn’t carry a gun. Most people I know do not have guns and have never fired a weapon in their lives. But you can still be an agent of chaos, finding yourself in a situation where things happen around you.”
Accepting the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Moura said,”The Secret Agent is a film about memory, or the lack of memory. And generational trauma. I think that if trauma can be passed along generations, values can too.” He dedicated the award to “those sticking to their values in difficult moments.”
