After capturing Cannes with “Aquarius” and “Bacurau,” Kleber Mendonça Filho returns with “The Secret Agent,” a haunting political thriller set in Brazil’s 1970s dictatorship. The film won the Best Director, Best Actor, and FIPRESCI Prize awards at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and is now Brazil’s official submission for Best International Film at the 98th Academy Awards.
Set in Recife during Carnival 1977, the story follows Marcelo, played by Wagner Moura, a technology specialist fleeing his past in São Paulo. Hoping to reunite with his son, Marcelo finds himself trapped in a web of paranoia and surveillance as he realizes the city offers no escape from the country’s violent authoritarian grip.
Filho, who also wrote the screenplay, describes the project as an exploration of “how individuals operate within an oppressive system, how they resist or submit.” As with “Neighboring Sounds” and “Bacurau,” the director once again turns Recife into a living organism — a city of contradictions where modernity, fear, and resistance intersect. Shot on location in Recife and São Paulo, the film evokes an atmosphere of suffocating control and quiet rebellion, where every conversation feels bugged and every wall might have ears.
“The Secret Agent” stars Maria Fernanda Cândido and Gabriel Leone alongside Moura, and continues Filho’s fascination with the intersection of personal trauma and national history. The film’s visual palette — characterized by all neon glare, humid nightscapes, and analog surveillance technology — conveys both noir tension and sociopolitical urgency.
Produced by CinemaScópio Produções and distributed internationally by MUBI, the film marks Filho’s most ambitious narrative yet, blending his documentary eye with the precision of a thriller. After its Cannes triumph, where critics, including our own, called it “a masterpiece.” “The Secret Agent” arrives in U.S. theaters on November 26 via Neon.
