The Secret Agent
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The Secret Agent is the film of the moment. So much so, when I speak to the Brazilian duo Kleber Mendonça Filho and Wagner Moura in mid-January, the interview ends early because they receive a congratulatory phone call from Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president of Brazil.
Since its premiere at Cannes, where it won Best Actor and Best Director, The Secret Agent has continued to gain momentum. A few days prior, it won two Golden Globes (Best Foreign Language Film, Best Actor in a Drama). Though none of us aware of it yet, we’re speaking a few days before the film will receive four Oscar nominations: Best Film, Best Director, Best International Feature Film, and Best Actor.
Written and directed by Mendonça, the 57-year-old filmmaker behind Aquarius and Bacurau, The Secret Agent is a sneakily titled film – it’s not a spy-thriller, per se, but a novelistic period drama about trauma, memory, and resistance. Or perhaps it is a genre film. There’s a gory shootout, espionage hijinks, and surreal detours into B-movie madness. At the centre is Moura, a 49-year-old actor with Old Hollywood magnetism, as Armando, an ordinary man trapped in an all-consuming nightmare.
It’s 1977 – a “period of great mischief”, an onscreen text quips – when Armando, an academic, arrives in Recife to stay with other political refugees. Hiding from hitmen, Armando adopts the name Marcelo and works in a government ID office while waiting for a fake passport and a chance to reunite with his son. However, the film’s 161 minutes are more concerned with Armando’s interactions with those around him: the Carnival revellers who party in the face of fascism; a cinema projectionist who passes on clandestine messages; even a cat with two faces.
“My main concern was to give a widescreen panorama of Brazil as a society,” says Mendonça, who met Moura in 2005 in his former career as a journalist. “I wanted to express the diversity of Brazil in the faces and bodies.”
“Usually, what brings down a regime is the little displays of resistance from day-to-day, regular people,” says Moura, an actor whose credits include Elite Squad and Civil War. “My character sticks with his values. These are the ones that can transform an authoritarian regime. It takes time. It takes longer. Like what’s going on in the West, for example – it’s about being outspoken about what’s going on there. The murder of [Renee Good] by ICE, and the invasion of Venezuela – we have to talk about these things.”
“In Walter Salles’ film [I’m Still Here], it’s one man who took an envelope full of letters to the airport,” says Mendonça. “It’s not really connected to a freedom fighter with guns. Just someone doing good.”
When Aquarius premiered at Cannes in 2016, Mendonça and his actors protested the Brazilian government on the red carpet, which prompted Dilma Rousseff, the president at the time, to demand a boycott of the film. Similarly, 2019’s Bacurau was widely perceived as an anti-Bolsonaro movie, and, like Aquarius, it was pointedly not selected by Brazil as its Oscar submission. Moura faced a similar fate with his directorial debut, 2019’s Marighella, which had its domestic release blocked by Bolsonaro.
“It’s amazing to live in a country where the government, the president, and the state respect their artists,” says Moura. “Lula understands that culture is important. That’s a huge thing.”
My character sticks with his values. These are the ones that can transform an authoritarian regime. It takes time
“The film is incredibly well-received in Brazil, and has become a blockbuster,” says Mendonça. “But there’s a small percentage from the far right who can’t accept that the film is so successful, and was done with public funding. I would say that 85 per cent of Brazilian society supports the film.”
The box office success is even more impressive when considering the movie’s idiosyncrasies. In the depicted era of censorship, Recife newspapers were unable to write about homophobic attacks committed by the police; instead, journalists used coded language, like a “hairy leg” responsible for violence. Thus, in The Secret Agent, an animated leg – it’s disembodied and, indeed, hairy – takes wild kicks at gay lovers and weed smokers in a park at night.
Mendonça also toys with cinema language by frequently cutting to the present day. Sat at a laptop, a young history student, Flavia (Lufési), transcribes audio interviews from 1977 and learns of Armando’s persecution. When Flavia reaches out to Armando’s son, Fernando, she’s greeted by an adult who’s also played by Moura.
“I didn’t know how I was going to play Fernando,” says Moura. “It was my last day of shooting. I wanted to live in the skin of his father as much as I could. It came as a surprise for me. It was an interesting day on set.”
“And a very emotional day,” says Mendonça.
“Very emotional,” says Moura. “The plan was to have the same actor play the father and son as a manifestation of the generational transmission of trauma, values, and DNA.”
“I wrote the script for Wagner,” says Mendonça. “And I wrote in the script that Fernando would look like a lazy genetic model of his father. It’s something I’ve experienced many times. I, myself, look like my father, and I’ve met the children of people who are now gone, and I found it really moving. The children feel like a continuation of their mother or father.” The director theorised that Fernando’s grandparents hid the truth from him. “It’s common in Brazil for families to avoid discussing the military regime. That’s part of how the son grew up. And, by the way, he’s older than his father was in the 1977 section.”
As for the presence of Flavia, who is effectively the 2026 audience’s surrogate, Mendonça refers to the fact that he’s been a film programmer since 1998. At screenings, he’s still excited by the presence of young people discovering old cinema, and thus it made sense for him that it’s a Flavia who’s passionate about Armando and his resistance network. Moura emphatically agrees.
“I love that she’s a young Brazilian from the future that cares about memory,” says Moura. “I love the coincidence that, right now, Brazil is finally getting even with its self-inflicted amnesia, with its memory problem, by sending Bolsonaro to jail. Fernando can’t deal with the memory that she puts on the table for him. He’s too traumatised. There’s a generation of Brazilians who are traumatised by their loved ones who just disappeared.”
“Dilma Rousseff herself was tortured in the early 70s,” says Mendonça. “When she became president, she was instrumental in putting together the truth-and-reconciliation committee, which would go back to the past and find names who perpetrated the brutal acts of violence against the civilian population. As soon as soon as Bolsonaro came to power, he shut it down, and said, ‘Only dogs look for bones.’ That says a lot about Brazil’s relationship to memory.”
The Secret Agent premiered almost a year ago, yet it’s still being appreciated from new angles, whether it’s the significance of one of the 60-plus speaking roles, or the parallels with Mendonça’s 2023 documentary Pictures of Ghosts. Ask ten people their favourite or most meaningful image, and you’ll hear ten different answers. The corpse outside a petrol station. The blowjob in a cinema. Anything involving scene-stealer Tânia Maria.
“There’s a strange phenomenon on Letterboxd, where people watch the film once, then they go back and rediscover the film,” says Mendonça. “And then they go for a third time. The Secret Agent is very dense in information, and there are many details which you’re able to connect with once…” The director looks at his phone. “I think the president of Brazil is calling me right now.”
I concede that if it’s Lula calling, they should answer the phone, and not complete whatever they were about to say about Letterboxd.
“The president of Brazil is calling us,” Moura confirms, preparing himself for a different kind of conversation. “It was really great to talk to you.”
The Secret Agent is out in UK cinemas now.
