Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto, 2025) marks a moment of consolidation in one of contemporary Brazilian cinema’s most consistent careers.
Since his early short films such as Cold Tropics (Recife Frio, 2009), the filmmaker has developed a unique style packed with movie references that tantalisingly falls somewhere between arthouse and genre film. These traits reach new heights of self-awareness and formal freedom in The Secret Agent, which has been nominated for four Academy Awards, including best picture, and best actor for Wagner Moura.
The film belongs to a recent wave of Brazilian productions revisiting the military dictatorship (1964-1985), including Walter Salles’s Oscar-winning I’m Still Here (Ainda Estou Aqui, 2024), and actor/director Wagner Moura’s Marighella (2019). Yet these films do more than reconstruct historical episodes: they process, through cinema, an unresolved trauma whose reverberations continue to shape Brazil’s political present.
