The Secret Agent (Drama)

Rating:

Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Producer: Emilie Lesclaux
Screenwriter: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Cinematographer: Evgenia Alexandrova
Composer: Mateus Alves,Tomaz Alves Souza
Editor: Eduardo Serrano
Production Designer: Thales Junqueira
Costume Designer: Rita Azevedo
Key Cast: Ítalo Martins,Laura Lufési,Igor de Araújo,Hermila Guedes,Gabriel Leone,Maria Fernanda Cândido,Alice Carvalho,Wagner Moura,Carlos Francisco,Robério Diógenes,Udo Kier

Winner of three major awards at Cannes, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s bravura political thriller set during Brazil’s military dictatorship is a wild widescreen odyssey.

It’s 1977 in Recife, and a man calling himself Marcelo (Wagner Moura, Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, MIFF 2011) hopes to use the colour and chaos of Carnival – and the craze building up around Steven Spielberg’s Jaws – as a cover to escape military-controlled Brazil with his son. The only problem: regime forces are also using Carnival as a distraction to disappear dozens of left-leaning citizens each day. In an attempt to find freedom, Marcelo must dodge the hitmen on his trail, navigate endless webs of corruption, and journey deep into the daffy dysfunction and death-soaked darkness of a nation driving headlong towards a cliff.

Kleber Mendonça Filho (Bacurau, MIFF 2019) has delivered some of 21st-century cinema’s most insightful studies of Brazilian society, and The Secret Agent offers a fictional companion piece to his documentary evocation of Recife’s lost cinemas and erased architecture, Pictures of Ghosts (MIFF 2023). Transcending Cannes’s unspoken one-major-award-per-film rule to snag three major gongs in Competition – Best Director for Mendonça, Best Actor for Moura’s commanding turn and a FIPRESCI Prize – The Secret Agent is a playful, masterfully photographed trip into the past that will be of particular interest to admirers of Walter Salles’s similarly 70s-set Academy Award winner I’m Still Here.

“Sure to be one of the best films of the year … Moments of anarchic humor amid genuine suspense are exactly the kind of thing that makes Kleber Mendonça Filho’s fourth narrative feature such a thrilling original.” – The Hollywood Reporter


Presented by