Kleber Mendonça Filho has a decent excuse for arriving late. As I am gathering my notes, the PR explains that the film-maker has to take a phone call from his country’s president.
Fair enough. Over the past decade or so Mendonça has established himself as one of Brazil’s most acclaimed directors. Films such as Aquarius, Bacurau and, now, The Secret Agent combine acute political awareness with a taste for big stories and genre-adjacent entertainment.
No wonder Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wants to have a word. Succeeding the right-wing Jair Bolsonaro in 2023, Lula – as he is known everywhere, and who is a member of the Workers’ Party – emerged as a friend of the arts.
“Lula happens to be a political leader who normally believes in culture, and I think that’s a really cool thing,” Mendonça says when he emerges from the call. “It’s quite a change in terms of what we had before. The previous president saw artists as enemies – enemies of the people, in a way.
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“And it’s a major change to get a call from a president saying, ‘Well, congratulations for everything that this film has achieved.’ I’m all for it. I feel good about getting a call like that.”
Congratulations are, indeed, in order. The Secret Agent has been on a critical roll since its premiere at Cannes in 2025. Detailing a complex yarn from Brazil’s totalitarian 1970s, the film was the only title to win two main prizes at the French film festival: best director for Mendonça, best actor for the charismatic Wagner Moura.
But few, at that point, felt The Secret Agent would be a serious competitor at the Oscars. The title is a tad deceptive. This is not any sort of conventional thriller. Moura plays a former academic who, after causing a furore about financial corruption, finds himself on the run from a pair of unsightly hit men. He ends up working, under an assumed identity, in a governmental bureaucracy in the city of Recife. His son is meanwhile being raised by a grandparent who runs a beautifully ornate cinema.
That only scratches the surface. The Secret Agent is a proudly puzzling film that often confuses the viewer as to where attention should focus.
“I love the title,” Mendonça says. “I think it’s short and sexy, but I also felt that if I gave the audience enough thrills – fake names, new identity, changing appearance, intrigue and suspense and maybe one chase sequence – I would get away with the title.
“I still get complaints, almost like customer-service complaints. Ha ha! ‘Oh, I was expecting The Bourne Identity or James Bond.’ I’m sorry, but that’s not what the film is.”
Nonetheless, The Secret Agent really set in with audiences and critics. As we speak, Moura is celebrating a victory over Oscar Isaac and Michael B Jordan, among others, at the Golden Globes. (This may have triggered the call from Lula.) It also beat Sentimental Value and It Was Just an Accident, winner of the Palme d’Or, to best picture not in English.
It subsequently landed four Oscar nominations: best international feature, best casting, best actor and, crucially, best picture. How is Mendonça enjoying awards season? Plenty, I’d say.
“Well, I feel lucky,” he says. “Being put in the position of travelling so much and talking to people like yourself and just meeting people. Some of the people I met over the last seven months are people I admire. I got to meet Peter Weir in Sydney, for example. Actors, actresses, film critics, programmers. I love programmers. I’m a programmer myself. Still my day job.”
Mendonça was born and raised in Recife, on the northeastern coast of Brazil, but spent a fair portion of the 1980s in the UK (his English is beyond immaculate) while his mother was working on a PhD. He then returned to Brazil and took up work as a journalist and film critic. He also began programming a cinema in Recife “to show everything that the multiplexes will not touch”.
The Secret Agent plays (in the best way) like the work of a critic and programmer. By no measure is this a film about cinema, but contemporaneous movie culture is there as a constant, sometimes subversive undercurrent. There is an absurdist diversion that references the popularity of Jaws. Some scenes take place while Richard Donner’s The Omen plays out its gaudy horrors.
This is a record of a terrible time for Brazil – at the centre of the military dictatorship – but it is also at home to cultural nostalgia. A paradox?
“Well, sometimes I ask myself, am I being nostalgic or am I competent at rebuilding a sense of time?” he says. “Brazil was undergoing a military regime at the time. But it doesn’t mean that people were 100 per cent unhappy all the time. We were living our lives.
“I remember, growing up in the 1970s, I had a happy childhood. I never saw Jaws when I was nine, but I saw the posters outside the cinema. I saw the lobby cards. And in a way, in that time, without the internet, it was one way of being introduced to a film. The same thing with The Omen.”
[ Jaws: One of the most gripping films out of HollywoodOpens in new window ]
This is a good point. Three or four years older than Mendonça, I can remember having a similarly odd relationship with The Exorcist. I knew almost everything about it. The poster image was burned into my brain. But I didn’t actually see the thing for another 15 years or so. (It wasn’t even on telly, remember.)
“Didn’t it feel like you had already seen the film in a way? Back then,” he says.
It did. Just as I felt I had seen all the films illustrated in Denis Gifford’s book A Pictorial History of Horror Movies.
“When I was a kid I had cousins,” Mendonça says. “They were older than me. And they would see the films I wasn’t allowed to see yet. They would tell me the whole film, scene by scene. So it was almost like an oral history of film as those films came out.”
Something more sinister is also going on. I can only assume that Mendonça’s return to the dictatorship years reflects his concerns about the current state of democracy. More specifically, is he addressing the nostalgia that the right in Brazil might feel for the era depicted in The Secret Agent and Walter Salles’s recent, Oscar-winning I’m Still Here? It is not an insane theory.
“That’s an interesting question, because I can’t really say it was on my mind,” he says.
And yet?
“I began writing the script in the second half of 2020, during the pandemic,” he continues. “When the right came to power through democratic elections, it was a kind of a ridiculous attempt to bring back the ‘golden days’ of the military regime.
“It’s almost like these older men, now in their 60s – all white men, of course – were really trying to bring back their youthful days. Bolsonaro assigned military types to key government positions, which is really hard to understand. He was almost trying to weaponise his government with this military state of mind.”
That must have been a difficult time to be a left-leaning film-maker. Still, Mendonça has been there before. I can remember, at Cannes in 2016, attending the world premiere of Aquarius, his quiet rage at contemporary philistinism, and observing cast and crew producing signs protesting the recent impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s left-wing president for the previous five years.
Aquarius, among the year’s most celebrated films, was, pointedly, not picked as Brazil’s official submission for the best-international-picture Oscar.
“A few times I would get a Brazilian diplomat come up to me, lower his or her voice, and say, ‘I’m not supposed to be talking to you. There was a memo sent telling us to avoid interacting with you and to not support your film in any way. I think it’s a scandal, and I’m here to say that I support you.’”
Mendonça is not the sort of man to get complacent. But, for the moment, anyway, Brazilian culture, including its cinema, is in a happier place. One of the joys of the 2025 awards season was the huge support for I’m Still Here – not least in Ireland – from the Brazilian diaspora. The flags were unavoidable at the sidebar of any online awards announcement. They are back for the (superior, in my view) The Secret Agent.
“I love it. I love it,” Mendonça says. “It is easy for people to express their passion online for a national cultural product, which is a piece of cinema. I love to see all those good vibes coming out of Brazil internationally.”
The Secret Agent opens in cinemas on Friday, February 20th, with previews from Friday, February 13th
