‘The Secret Agent’ Team Talks Of Opening In Brazil, How It Triggered Brutal Memories, And Why There’s Hope After A Democratic Backslide And Recovery

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details about the plot of the movie The Secret Agent.

The Secret Agent, Brazil’s official selection for the International Feature Film race at next year’s Oscars, recently opened in that country, a special moment for its writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho and producer Emilie Lesclaux.

Set in 1977, the film centers on an academic, Armando (Wagner Moura), who has become a resister to the country’s repressive military dictatorship and returns to the city of Recife, with the elderly Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) finding shelter and fellowship for him with other dissidents in her apartment building. While in the city, Armando reunites with his young son, being cared for by his in-laws after the death of his wife. Armando is warned by the resistance to leave the country as regime hit men track him down.

The movie is far different than other political thrillers, with its emphasis on character and relationships as well as some of the absurdities of life under a repressive regime. The legend of a terrorizing severed, hairy leg plays a part in the story, something the director notes was rooted in the journalistic censorship of the era.

The Secret Agent premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where Moura was named Best Actor and Mendonça Best Director.

Mendonça’s movie is a very personal one, in part because he found himself as a target of the political right, as he has been a critic of the recent regime of Jair Bolsonaro, which ended in 2023. Bolsonaro has been sentenced to prison for his role in a coup attempt after his election loss.

Brazil‘s recent experience with Bolsonaro stirred memories of the country’s past dictatorship, while the film has resonated elsewhere where democracy is under threat or backsliding, including in the United States. In many ways, The Secret Agent grapples with how the past is remembered, rediscovered or forgotten.

The film, Mendonça said, “is very much about memory, and how memory can also be implanted or deleted.” That plays out in the ending with with Armando’s son, a finale that Mendonça thinks is “very Brazilian, which is, ‘I don’t want to go into that … this is so unpleasant, and this is so traumatic, I’d rather just move on.’ ”

Deadline spoke with Mendonça and Lesclaux last week.

DEADLINE: Did you get any surprising reaction from from people who lived through that era?

KLEBER MENDONÇA FILHO: There are all kinds of reactions. There are reactions of those who were actually persecuted or were in exile, but there are also reactions of people who knew people. Yesterday, Marcio, he was second B camera on the film, cameraman. His mother was very moved. She hadn’t seen the film, and she was very moved, because right at the end of the film, and there was a photograph of Wagner’s character, you know the spoiler part when he died, she [said it] reminded her of a friend she lost, and he was killed. So I think it brings back many memories of the older ones. … The younger people are like, “So the dictatorship was was real and was bad,” because for a number of reasons, it felt very much like a distant notion. And I think these films are bringing some contextualization into the way we look at history. Traveling in time, watching this film, people say that there’s something about the period detail and reconstruction that feels very strong.

EMILIE LESCLAUX: Especially people from here, they feel so moved by the attention to details, things in the city that do not exist anymore. A lot a lot of people talk about it was [about], of course, the dictatorship, but the fact that Wagner’s character is not into politics.

MENDONÇA: He’s into politics, but he’s not a fighter.

LESCLAUX: He’s an academic, a common man. It’s surprising for many people that he didn’t need to be like a guerrilla fighter to have to get into trouble. And I heard many comments in that sense.

MENDONÇA: There’s a lot of discussion now on how women are an important part of the film. I always thought this would be my most masculine film script, but it turns out that there’s a lot of attention given to women. And as I thought it would happen, Tânia Maria — she’s a huge star in Brazil now. Media attention. And we’re having to really tone things down, because she’s 78 and you have to put some control on the demand for interviews. Otherwise, she’ll spend the whole day giving interviews.

DEADLINE: You said that the logic of 50 years ago is very different from the logic of today. What did you mean by that?

MENDONÇA: I think that as much as society now, everywhere, still has so many issues to deal with, we did improve as a society. The use of words, for example, I think there are some very harsh words written into the script, and I had to discuss this while we were rehearsing and shooting the film.

But ironically, I always thought I was writing a period piece, which I was, but because of what happened in Brazil in the last 10 years, we really went back in time many ways. We had a president [Jair Bolsonaro] who is now going to jail. And this is about the Truth and Reconciliation Committee set up by Dilma Rousseff [president of Brazil from 2011-2016]. And I think that puts things into perspective, because Dilma Rousseff, she was tortured herself in the early ’70s. She became a president, and then she set up the committee. When she is ousted, the far right comes in, and then someone like Jair Bolsonaro basically shoots down the Truth and Reconciliation Committee by saying that ‘only dogs look for bones.’ So it’s almost like I was writing a period piece, but at the same time, I was finding myself in a new contemporary version of Brazil, which was actually trying to bring back the good old times of the regime. But thankfully that right now in 2025 feels like a nightmare we went through, and the nightmare was over when [Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva] came back for his third term. And right now in Brazil, and I mean, right now, I think we are in very good shape in terms of the reconstruction of the democratic thinking in this country. We are back in having a government that respects the democratic ideal of the country.

DEADLINE: And Emilie, we’re seeing democracy backslide in other countries. Do you think that this is a movie that maybe can shed light on that and maybe even give people hope when they think about how how things ended up in Brazil?

LESCLAUX: For sure. I think in the many screenings that we had in several countries, we would feel that, even if it’s a very Brazilian film story, people would identify with many subjects in the film. It has to do with the times we are living, I think. In the States, we heard a lot of academics [were] very moved by the film. In other countries, we heard very moving stories. The Mexico Film Festival — they responded really strongly to the film.

MENDONÇA: We’re getting very strong reactions from U.S. observers. Also in Spain, because of the Franco regime.

LESCLAUX: And also to the fact that people get together in these moments, and we have that in the film, also through Dona Sebastiana and building the community. This is another aspect that people talk about — solidarity and getting together.

MENDONÇA: I think a lot of what I wrote into the film happened because of the experience we had in the Bolsonaro years. We also have the pandemic coupled with that. So it was a very strong moment for people to — we used to say in Portuguese — hold each other’s hands. That’s what we did. We banded together. And I think every time there is a dramatic moment in society, people have to stick together and take care of each other. That seems to catch a lot of people off guard when they see the film. I think many people think they’re going to see a classic dictatorship, about times of repression, and it’s actually very much about love and affection and people taking care of each other.

DEADLINE: How different you think the response would have been had this been made and come out during the Bolsonaro regime?

MENDONÇA: That’s a really interesting question, because it also happened to I’m Still Here [directed by Walter Salles] and it also happened to Bacurau [directed by Mendonça and released in the first year of the Bolsonaro government].

All of these films, they had phenomenal support and admirers, but there is always a percentage of the far right which keeps attacking these films, and they do it in some outlandish ways, not only in the press, but also on social media. And they go to Letterboxd, and they try to lower the ratings of these films. It’s a bit like a Quixote kind of attitude, because the films are very well received in the country. But it really feels like there is always this ideological criticism to some of the films. And you can even expect the keywords — leftist intellectual, and then you kind of give up on what you’re reading, because you know what’s coming. But it’s really interesting because there is always an ideological side to the reception of any film that deals with truthful accounts, historical accounts of Brazilian history, or a film like Bacurau or Aquarius, which will tell you a story that might be perceived as not coming from the right or from the conservative point of view of society. I actually find it fascinating to follow the film and see the classic reactions, ideological reactions, to a piece of work.

DEADLINE: Kleber, what are your memories of 1977?. How much did you recall when you were a child of the military dictatorship, or was that kind of kept from you?

MENDONÇA: I had a happy childhood in the ’70s. The one memory related to the regime is going to school and on Friday, having to march like a little soldier with all the other kids. And that is something I never forgot. I might have even thought that it was strange at the time that a school would make us march.

I have many personal memories of that time, because I was nine and 10. My mother, she fought cancer at the time, and it was a major health crisis in my family, and that was something that my uncles tried to hide from myself and from my brother. My younger uncle took us to the cinema this crazy amount of times, basically, to take us out of the of the whole situation. That had a huge impact on me, because not only did I love films already, but it showed me the city center and the downtown area and the movie palaces. I think that is why the film is set in ’77.

LESCLAUX: He’s the little boy wanting to see Jaws [as does Armando’s son in the movie].

MENDONÇA: I did want to see Jaws at the time, but I wasn’t allowed, because it was rated 14. So I think many of these things, they … gave me heart so that I could actually sit down and write the script, and then all the other stuff are memories I borrowed from my parents, from my uncles, from older people, from the newspapers, from research and photographs.

Something fascinating happened yesterday. An old friend from university, she sent me a Ford Motor Company ad from 1970. This is the height of the dictatorship, and it’s an ad for the Ford Galaxy, a large sedan at the time. And in this ad, you can see the trunk, and inside the trunk you can see a woman was tied up, and the copy says, “Secret agents believe the Galaxie trunk is just right for certain missions.” This is at the height of the military dictatorship.

DEADLINE: I can’t believe that.

MENDONÇA: It is what was taking place in the country. So you can look the ad. This is an expensive car. You can you can see how the elites were thinking, what the elites were thinking at the time. There is a sequence in the film where it’s not a Ford Galaxie. It’s a Chevrolet Impala, where they have a woman in the trunk. So this is really interesting.

DEADLINE: And Emilie, how much did you know?

LESCLAUX: I am French, but I my mom is from Argentina. So the period of dictatorship in Latin America is something I was always aware of and curious about. And I heard many stories from my own family as well, in Argentina, which was a very violent dictatorship. So it’s a period that I was always interested in and always read about. So I was aware. But I see that in Brazil, many young people don’t really know much [about it]. That’s why I think Walter Salles’ film [I’m Still Here] was so important and popular, because a lot of people got in touch with that period. That was really an interesting phenomenon here in Brazil.

DEADLINE: Armando meets his demise in the movie, but he stuck to his values. What do you think this movie says about survival under these conditions?

MENDONÇA: That’s a tough question, because I would have done the same thing he did in the story. I think so many people stick to their values and and then they survive, and others don’t. It’s a moral dilemma.

I’m also interested in the notion that some someone actually finds it so absurd what’s happening to himself or herself that [he or she] almost refuses to believe that this has actually happened. I mean, we can go back to so many dictatorships, to the Soviet Union, to J. Edgar Hoover going after so many people, to the dictatorship in Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Chile. Pinochet died of old age. So did Franco in Spain, and so many torturers and psychopaths in the Brazilian military. They died at 90, 95 with fat paychecks.

So I think politics can be complex and extremely brutal, but I was also really interested in this character not being a freedom fighter. He is in his own way, but not in terms of carrying guns and carrying firearms and shooting people. I was more interested in him being just a great person.

I myself got into trouble with the far right about 10 years ago, just because I make films, and they thought that my films became a little too prestigious.

LESCLAUX: You would say your opinion in interviews and that brought us a lot of problems. What can you say?

MENDONÇA: It’s fascinating, the idea that you can become almost a fighter with you realizing that you haven’t done anything extraordinary. And now people consider you some kind of enemy or a real fighter against the system. And that I find both amusing and fascinating.

DEADLINE: How did you own experience influence the making of The Secret Agent?

MENDONÇA: Yeah, and that it is where the film comes from. I made Aquarius. We had the world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. At the time, Dilma Rousseff was being ousted in a way that I found, that millions of Brazilians found, technically wrong and morally despicable. The world didn’t know about it. I was following Le Monde and the New York Times and so many other publications. El Pais in Spain. Everybody seemed to be hanging out with the wrong people in Brazil — I’m talking about the correspondents. So Dilma is ousted in the most unfair and despicable and misogynist way.

And then we go to Cannes to for the world premiere. On the week we go to Cannes, they shut down the Ministry of Culture. They should be arrested for doing that on the spot, because shutting down the Ministry of Culture is against democratic values and against the country itself. So we go to the premiere at the red carpet and we do a very simple protest [saying] “there is a coup d’etat happening in Brazil right now.” And then, after that, the whole international press said, “Whoa, wait. Something is happening.” It was more than 150 people who did that in Cannes, but I was the one singled out because I’m the director. And and then there was a sh*t storm after that — the craziest, most bizarre accusations, the kind of thing that people with time in their hands would develop in a lab, completely artificial. And then they have a network of journalists who make it look very sinister, and it’s just a crazy moment in my life.