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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn now to look at one of the most celebrated international films of the year, The Secret Agent, directed by the Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho. The film has been nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor.
The film is set in 1977 Brazil, during the final years of the military dictatorship, and stars Wagner Moura as Marcelo, a technology expert who’s on the run hoping to reunite with his son in Recife during Carnival, but the city is not the nonviolent haven he seeks.
NPR film critic John Powers says of the film, quote, “this small, brutal, often funny thriller uses a travails of one ordinary man to capture a reactionary era in its daily realities and surreal absurdities, its public cruelty and private decency.”
Director Kleber Mendonça Filho wrote the screenplay during the presidency of the far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. This is the film’s trailer.
ALEXANDRE: [played by Carlos Francisco] [translated] You really think you should be here?
ARMANDO/MARCELO: [played by Wagner Moura] [translated] I’m taking my son.
JOÃO PEDRO: [played by Marcelo Valle] [translated] It’s foul play at the highest level.
SEBASTIANA: [played by Tânia Maria] [translated] You have to be there very early on Friday morning.
VILMAR: [played by Kaiony Venâncio] [translated] Is that Armando?
ELISÂNGELA: [played by Geane Albuquerque] [translated] No. His name is Marcelo.
VILMAR: Armando. Armando.
ALEXANDRE: [translated] If I was you, I’d get the hell out of here.
We need to protect what we still have. You and my grandson.
HENRIQUE: [played by Luciano Chirolli] [translated] You have no idea who you’re messing with, boy.
SEBASTIANA: [translated] To a better Brazil, with less mischief.
ARMANDO/MARCELO: [translated] This man, I’d kill him with a hammer.
VALDEMAR: [played by Thomás Aquino] [translated] Do you carry a gun?
ARMANDO/MARCELO: [translated] No, but I know how to use a hammer.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the trailer for The Secret Agent. It won Best Director and Best Actor, Wagner Moura, at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.
I interviewed the film’s acclaimed writer and director, Kleber Mendonça Filho, this week and started by asking him how he came up with the idea for this film.
KLEBER MENDONÇA FILHO: Well, the idea came together, as it often does, from different angles. First of all, I wanted to do a film with Wagner. So, to make a film with an actor, you’ve got to sit down and write a script. The second thing, I was coming from Pictures of Ghosts, my previous film, which is an essay film. And that film gave me a lot of information on Recife, my city, on filmgoing in the 20th century. And it just put me in the mood to write a story which would take me back to the past.
On top of that, I wanted to write a thriller set in the ’70s. And as I was writing, I began to realize that a lot of what was happening in Brazil during the Bolsonaro years was, in fact, creeping in and being part of the logic of what I was writing, because what those people did, Bolsonaro and his inner circle, they — it really felt like they were trying to bring back the good old days of the military regime in the ’60s and ’70s. And once I understood that, I think the film strengthened its own inner logic. But it’s only something that I realized much later in the process. And today, I can talk to you very openly about this, but it’s something that I came to understand quite slowly.
So, when you write, when you make a film, when you think about what you’re doing, sometimes you capture a certain frequency which is in the air. And I think The Secret Agent is very much about the past, but it’s very much about the past repeating itself through amnesia, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: For people who aren’t familiar with Brazil’s history, with this reprise, perhaps, echoes of the past with Bolsonaro’s presidency, go back to the 1960s. Talk about what happened for 20 years, up until the mid-’80s.
KLEBER MENDONÇA FILHO: Well, in 1964, there was a military coup, March 1964, and that military regime went on to rule Brazil in the ’60s, in the ’70s. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, it began to crumble, and yet just crumbled out of being completely rotten. 1985 is when we began to think about general elections, democratic elections. And it was a violent period. It had support by the U.S. at the time, because, of course, it was a division between East and West. I think the West and many in Brazil feared that Brazil would fall into the hands of communism. So that’s one of the reasons that the coup d’état took place in 1964. And anyone who questioned or just disagreed with what was going on was either persecuted or tortured or went into exile.
And the film takes place in ’77, which is towards the end of the decadence of that military regime, but where the democratic forces, they were still very much intimidated. And that’s exactly what they tried to bring back in 2017 with the democratic election of Jair Bolsonaro.
AMY GOODMAN: Introduce us to the hairy leg.
KLEBER MENDONÇA FILHO: The hairy leg is a wonderful urban legend. And the urban legend of the hairy leg was developed by two journalists, one of them called Raimundo Carrero. He worked in a newspaper in Recife, Diario de Pernambuco, which is featured in the film. And he came up with the hairy leg as a way, a deterrent to deal with censorship. He could not write about what actually happened involving the security forces, the police, the military police, because they were very violent against the people. So, instead of having his articles censored and slashed, he came up with the hairy leg. And he began to print straight stories, where the incidents would be described in a journalistic fashion, but instead of saying that the military forces did it, he said that the hairy leg did it. And it would come with cartoons and drawings of this zombie, disembodied leg attacking people. And it became a cultural and popular phenomenon, because, of course, the radio picked it up and did radio plays with the hairy leg. And little kids — I remember as a little kid in the ’70s being terrified of the hairy leg. And I think it’s a fascinating development of a dictatorship. It reminded me a little bit of how the Czech press had to deal with, you know, the Soviet invasion, using the media, but not really being open about what they were, just using suggestion. And for many years, I wanted to use it in a film, and it finally happened. I think it’s a great scene in the film, which gets quite a lot of reactions, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to the hairy leg in The Secret Agent.
TEREZA: [played by Isabél Zuaa] [translated] “A local man named Pedro Jorge do Nascimento, 27, a student, living in the Mustardinha district, was out on an evening walk in 13 de Maio Park with a friend by the name of Alexandrino Borges, 32, a dental prosthetist living at Bomba do Hemetério, when they were caught by surprise by a shadow that came hopping out of nowhere and started kicking them.”
But this is so odd.
HAROLDO: [played by João Vitor Silva] [translated] Odd, but we all know what that is, don’t we?
TEREZA: [translated] It’s treated as news in the paper!
CLAUDIA: [played by Hermila Guedes] [translated] Tereza, read the bit about the attack. It’s great. Read it.
TEREZA: [translated] But you’ve read it.
CLAUDIA: [translated] But it sounds so much better in your Angolan accent.
TEREZA: [translated] Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Another clip from The Secret Agent, the four-times Oscar-nominated film. This is also focusing on a newspaper that they’re reading.
KLEBER MENDONÇA FILHO: Yeah, there is this idea in the film. It’s not something that I planned. I just realized once I was rereading the script, and then I embraced that idea. Everything you see in the newspapers in this film is either imprecise, wrong or just fantasy or lies. And it doesn’t only come from the fact that we are dealing with the dictatorship and the newspapers were used to make the dictatorship work morally, let’s say. But it also comes from my own experience working in a newsroom in the ’90s. I was a journalist and professional journalist. And I saw many decisions going on in the newsroom which had to deal with someone’s maybe losing money if something is going to come out, or maybe we should not name that person, or maybe we should give it another word to make it sound less harsh. And this is something that, coming out of journalism school, it was quite a learning experience, because, of course, in journalism school, you learn what the world should be, and in the newsroom, you understand what it has to be.
AMY GOODMAN: As we’re talking now, the U.S. and Israel have just bombed Iran. Iran has retaliated, attacking other Gulf countries. You wake up on Saturday morning. This is the time leading up to the Oscars, but it’s more than that. It’s a time when a film like this about a dictatorship is getting global attention. And what were your thoughts?
KLEBER MENDONÇA FILHO: I can’t help thinking that history is a cycle of repetitions. I’m 57 years old now. And over the years, I have seen so many hyperviolent, brutal developments that have to do with aggression, just violence and land grabs.
AMY GOODMAN: Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, the director and screenwriter of The Secret Agent. The film’s been nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor. The film stars Wagner Moura. To see the full interview, go to democracynow.org.
That does it for today’s show. On Saturday, March 7th, I’ll be in Savannah, Georgia, at the Hindsight Film Festival for a screening of the award-winning documentary Steal This Story, Please!, about the 30 years of Democracy Now! It begins at 7:00. Check our website at democracynow.org. I’ll be speaking at the Q&A after with the film’s director, Tia Lessin. That does it again for the show. Democracy Now! produced with Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, María Taracena, Nicole Salazar. I’m Amy Goodman. Thank you so much for joining us.
