Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, The Secret Agent is a political thriller about memory, inheritance, and Brazil. Starring Wagner Moura, the film gradually builds suspense as it follows a man on the run through landscapes marked by violence and oblivion. The script dives deep into the emotional weight of a father’s journey while evoking the ghosts of a wounded nation. A powerful piece that echoes Pictures of Ghosts and reaffirms cinema as a space of resistance and remembrance.
Acclaimed director of films like Bacurau and Aquarius, filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho makes his most personal and intimate movie in Pictures of Ghosts. Here, he makes use of tapes that he recorded throughout his life, mainly at the beginning of his adult life in the 1990s, to show how the world has changed - more specifically, Recife, almost always seen from the window of his house. From there, showing how cinema (and audiovisual in general) can turn anyone, any space or any animal into ghosts, Kleber gives a dissertation on how cinemas, as a place to be, have transformed and are, in fact, temples that house ghosts - either on the screen or even behind them. A powerful film, which balances between pessimism and optimism, and which dialogues with the reality of each person who is watching the film through Kleber's creative vision.
'Bacurau' is undoubtedly one of the most unique, peculiar and interesting films of Brazilian cinema in recent years. Directors Kleber Mendonça Filho ('Aquarius') and Juliano Dornelles mix the current zeitgeist with the purest culture of northeast Brazil and add a pinch (of blood) of Quentin Tarantino and Glauber Rocha's cinema. The result is precisely a kind of catharsis of the spirit of our time, with a lot of social and political criticism. Without paths or easy answers, the feature film exposes open wounds. It is no wonder that 'Bacurau' was applauded standing at the Cannes Film Festival, where it received the Jury Prize.
A movie about sound, but also about our complacencies and the current Brazilian middle class. In the end, we haven't changed much since the days of coronelismo. It is directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, the same director of 'Aquarius' and 'Bacurau'.