THE SECRET AGENT © Victor Juca
O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent): Kleber Mendonça Filho Explores Dark Dictatorship in Brazil
Kleber Mendonça Filho returns to the world of fiction after the nostalgic sidestep of Retratos Fantasmas (Pictures of Ghosts) (2023), his documentary about cinema in his hometown, with O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent), his third feature film presented in Competition. It’s a political thriller about the workings of repression and resistance.
With each successive film, Kleber Mendonça Filho delves further in his critical analysis of power dynamics and social inequalities that divide his country, combining social realism (O Som ao Redor (Neighboring Sounds), Aquarius), genre cinema (Bacurau), and documentary (Retratos Fantasmas (Pictures of Ghosts)). While he may draw on a range of cinematic codes, his work remains deeply rooted in his hometown of Recife, whose collective memory he enjoys exploring and whose architecture, which he has used as a backdrop for the majority of his projects, he loves filming.
Once again, Recife plays a central role in the Brazilian filmmaker’s fifth feature film, which this time invites viewers to join Marcelo (Wagner Moura) in 1970s Brazil, a country gripped by a military dictatorship. Marcelo, seeking to escape his mysterious past, leaves São Paulo for Recife, hoping to find some peace there. However, he soon discovers that the city, in the midst of Carnival celebrations, is far from a refuge – he is being watched.
In this political thriller, Kleber Mendonça Filho explains that he was seeking to “explore how individuals operate within an oppressive system, how they resist or submit.” The filmmaker, who shot the film in Recife and São Paulo in the spring of 2024, also says he paid particular attention to recreating the oppressive atmosphere of a dictatorship to convey the characters’ anguish to the viewers. Emphasizing that “This film immerses us in a period when walls had ears and where every move could be suspicious.”
