For Kleber Mendonça Filho, filmmaking is an act of both provocation and preservation. Mendonça was born in 1968, in the early years of a ruthless military dictatorship—a time when cinema, like much else, was harshly constrained. His mother, Joselice Jucá, was a historian who studied Brazil’s abolitionist movement, and she taught him that filling gaps in the cultural memory was a way to expose concealed truths. In Mendonça’s work, memory functions as a tool of defiance.
His relationship with film is inextricably linked with his home town, Recife—a port city where attractive beaches and high-rise developments coexist with sprawling favelas and rampant crime. In his youth, Mendonça was fascinated by the city’s grand cinema palaces. He carried a Super 8 camera to the tops of marquees and shot dizzying images; he spent hours in projection booths, learning the mechanics of how films reached the screen. Over time, Mendonça watched those theatres fall into decline, an experience that he likened to being aboard a ship as it wrecked. But even as Recife lost its allure, he made the city a fixture of his films—a way of vindicating its place in history. His first narrative feature, “Neighboring Sounds,” takes place on a street where he lived as a child, a setting that he spent years documenting. Later, he made “Pictures of Ghosts,” a documentary about Recife told largely through its cinemas.
In Mendonça’s work, political commentary coincides with art-house aesthetics and elements borrowed from genre movies—science fiction, Western, neo-noir. Questions of justice and truth often play out through dark comedy. “Neighboring Sounds,” an unflinching portrait of class hierarchy in Brazil, came out in 2012 and was widely acknowledged as one of the best films of the year. It was followed in 2016 by “Aquarius,” which depicts a woman’s crusade against wealthy developers seeking to demolish her seafront home. “Aquarius” was celebrated at festivals around the world, winning prizes everywhere from Sydney to Cartagena. As Mendonça’s international reputation grew, the hard-right President Jair Bolsonaro took office in Brazil, and Mendonça used his platform to denounce the country’s democratic erosion.
His latest film, “The Secret Agent,” is set in 1977, during the era of military rule. The protagonist is a scientist named Armando Solimões, played by Wagner Moura, who has been fending off the efforts of a government-linked businessman to take control of his lab in Recife. Now Solimões is on the run, scrambling to get his young son out of the city before hitmen can catch them. The film is both an indictment of authoritarian repression and an absurdist thriller, with set pieces involving a reanimated human leg and the hulking corpse of a tiger shark. Mendonça uses these surreal flourishes to reimagine the country of his youth—a place where gruesome crimes were committed by people determined to obscure the evidence. I recently sat down with him to talk about “The Secret Agent,” which has been nominated for Best Picture and Best International Feature at the Academy Awards, and about the power of reclaiming the past. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I want to start with Recife, the setting for this film. How does your home town fit into the history of filmmaking in Brazil?
A hundred years ago, in the silent era, just before sound came, a small group of filmmakers in Recife collaborated to make thirteen feature-length films. Only six survived. The media has always been concentrated in São Paulo and Rio, two thousand kilometres away in the southeast—not only cinema but money, radio, and television. Recife is in the northeast. It had one of the first law schools in Brazil, and many names from literature and music. But not much happened from the nineteen-twenties until the nineteen-seventies, in terms of filmmaking.
In the seventies, local artists began to use Super 8 cameras to make films, and that also became an interesting moment in filmmaking. Many of those films have survived. Then, in the nineties, something really interesting happened: we had a music scene which became very strong. That’s when I was leaving college, and it really pushed me toward developing my own projects. In the past thirty years, we could draw up a list of maybe twenty-five filmmakers, men and women, who are part of a very interesting film scene in Recife. Their films are all very personal and unusual, but they also managed to establish a communication with audiences—not ever becoming blockbusters, but becoming a thing.
How has Recife traditionally been portrayed in films?
We almost never saw Recife on the screen. There was one film from 1983, shot partly in Recife—a historical film by Tizuka Yamasaki, a filmmaker from the south. But that was it, really. I grew up watching telenovelas made in Rio, and of course Hollywood films. So the connection between reality and the projected image simply did not exist in terms of Recife. But, in 2002, when I was in the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival, I saw a film by a filmmaker called Claudio Assis. For the first time, I saw Recife in wide-screen and color, and I thought, I’m finally seeing the city I know.
After that, more films were made in Recife. “Pictures of Ghosts,” the film I did before “Secret Agent,” it’s really like a family album of the city, taken from so many films—from films done a hundred years ago to Super 8 films done in the seventies, maybe some newsreels done in the fifties. And then, in the past thirty years, so many shorts and features have been shot in Recife. That’s when we began to develop what I call a microclimate of local audiences really, really supporting local films. They would play all the local films and there would be lines around the block.
Many years ago, you were among those moviegoers in Recife.
My mother was the real cinephile. I was always being taken to the cinema as a young child. We spent almost five years living in England, where my mom did her Ph.D. research, and England played an important part in my life, showing me different filmgoing experiences. But then I went back to Recife in 1986. I was eighteen, and I rediscovered the city in a completely different way. The downtown was peppered with movie palaces.
You studied journalism and became a film critic. If you had an interest in films, why not make them?
There were no film schools in Recife at the time, and journalism brought me closer to film. From the first day, I got to meet new friends who were also cinephiles, and they dreamed of making films and writing about film or music. And then, slowly, I drifted toward an idea of cinema. I also used the equipment in the school to develop little short video projects. Today, you can make something interesting with a telephone. But, at that time, I needed a Super VHS editing suite with a camera, which I didn’t have. So that’s how I began.
Tell me about a typical early short.
“Lixo nos Canais” was about television—my own take on Brazilian television at the time. Not very sophisticated, but it had some acid. It was kind of sarcastic about the state of television and how it humiliates people, how it’s prejudiced, how it portrayed women and Black people. Grotesquerie was the norm.
Was there a moment when, after years as a critic, you decided that you were ready to make your first film?
I was very happy as a critic, because I wrote a lot. I saw a lot of films and my work had a readership. Of course, I made many people very unhappy, because I would write about Brazilian cinema. I had a youthful desire to propose changes, which is something that I do not regret. I think I was quite tough on a number of films.
What needed to be reformed, in your view?
The diversity of subject matter, the way films were shot, the complete absence of any cinema outside of São Paulo and Rio. Upper-class directors making films about very impoverished regions and communities—the classic themes, hunger and violence in the favelas. You could tell the filmmakers were not really familiar with those things. They just made the films.
So all of that came without a filter. And then I became quite known—and respected and despised—in some circles. Slowly, especially with the arrival of digital, I began to really make my short films, and I spent about ten years making short films, which became very successful. I always had someone saying, “Yeah, this is really cool, but when are you gonna make a real film?” And, in my mind, a short film is a real film. I once wrote that some features should open for short films, rather than the reverse.
But then something happened: I saw “Do the Right Thing,” by Spike Lee. And that really did something to me, because I had never seen an American film, a New York film, with new faces, a new way of looking at people in society. It was set in one block, one street. And this is something that I found very attractive. That’s probably when I began to think about a story. I finally sat down in 2007 or 2008 to write “Neighboring Sounds.” Sure enough, there was a lot of “Do the Right Thing” in “Neighboring Sounds”—and, of course, a lot of myself.
Talk about how working as a critic has informed your filmmaking.
I never compartmentalized criticism, filmmaking, going to the cinema. In my mind, it was all the same thing: watching films and writing about them and trying to understand what culture is trying to say. I think that probably explains why I was so hard on some films. Because I really think that each film or book is a reaction to life in society. So I think trying to understand what artistic expression or even the industry is trying to say is an interesting way of understanding cinema. And for me, that’s doing cinema. There was never a boundary for me.
You’ve described memories of your mother, the historian, returning home with a Panasonic tape recorder and a box full of cassettes. What did her craft teach you about oral history?
She talked a lot about how interested she was in listening to people. Let’s say that you’re going to write a story about a hotel. Normally you would interview the manager, because the manager is in a position of power. She would interview the guy at the door and the waiters and the cleaning lady. And then maybe, if she had time, she would interview the manager.
This is something that I only came to realize when I was making “Pictures of Ghosts,” because I really allowed myself to actively remember my mother. I found this amazing piece of television from the archives, where she gave an interview about history and oral history. She wasn’t a filmmaker, but her interviews were very much like films, because, once you sit down and listen to them, it’s very much like a documentary. She did a series of interviews, from 1979 to 1981, with the surviving filmmakers from the nineteen-twenties. These interviews, they’re precious. They are voices from the past.
I remember one day—it must have been 1980 or 1981—she came home and said, “I just interviewed Jota Soares, the filmmaker.” And I was just a kid. I was into films, so I was a little impressed, but I had no idea of what it meant. When I listened to the interview, four years ago, it was so moving. That’s one of the ideas in “The Secret Agent,” the idea that there is somebody listening in the future.
How did listening to those recordings contribute to the making of “The Secret Agent”?
It’s everything. It’s happened three times in my life as a screenwriter, twice with my own projects: I tried to write a script—great idea, great starting point, but I couldn’t make it work. My heart wasn’t in it.
I found the heart for “The Secret Agent” making “Pictures of Ghosts”—the power of things that survive and are kept in archives. Because the archive is somebody’s proof of life. When you hear a voice recorded in 1977, that person was alive in ’77. She was in love. She had dreams or desires, or she had to deal with the traffic. Sometimes, listening to these old tapes, it’s so moving, because sometimes you hear a truck in the background. Oh, that’s a truck. How many people were in that truck? What was it carrying?
And then things just get more complex because my mother died quite young. She died at fifty-four. So there was this whole thing of someone who’s not here anymore, but her voice still is, and her work still is.
Probably the strongest feeling of time travel that I have ever felt is making films and working with archives. Because time travel, as far as I know, doesn’t really exist. There is no DeLorean, no time machine. But, when you’re holding a cassette tape, it’s the actual cassette tape that was recorded in 1977 or 1974. I felt that a number of times when I went to cinematheques. You go into the restoration department, see the big scanner and the negative, and you go, “That’s the camera negative that was on the set in 1951.” It’s a historical artifact.
I worked for seven years on “Pictures of Ghosts”—a film that does not have a script. It was all driven by discoveries. This wonderful friend, a researcher who has been working with me, Karina, she calls one day and says, “I think I found 35-mm. images of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis on the Duarte Coelho Bridge.” And I go, “I think I have the film.”
All of those finds, these discoveries, they put me in the right state of mind to write “The Secret Agent.” A lot of “The Secret Agent” comes from the power of history. And the power of history has nothing to do with the way people remember history.
You met Wagner Moura at Cannes when you were a critic. And you said that the part of Armando was written for him.
It was written for him out of my admiration for him as an actor, as a person. Wagner is a good man. We happen to share many points of view on Brazil and on life. And we don’t have a problem expressing ourselves. I find myself with a microphone and somebody asks me a question, like, “What do you think of Bolsonaro?” And I say, “I don’t think he’s a good idea for Brazil.” That becomes a huge controversy—because major newspapers at the time were reluctant even to describe Bolsonaro as “far-right.”
Wagner has had his fair share of backlash and attacks from the right. And so have I. You can’t make a film and shut the fuck up—say, “Nothing to add.” “The Secret Agent” takes you many different places, but it’s very firmly grounded in historical reality. Yes, there is a cat with two heads, but that is Brazil in 1977, from the décor to the clothing to the cars to the atmosphere. So you build on realism, and then you can blur the lines on other elements.
At the beginning of the film, you describe that historical era as a “period of mischief,” which I thought was an interesting choice, considering that the word “dictatorship” is never mentioned in the film. Why?
It’s a literary way of beginning the film. I really like the classic credit roll in the beginning of a film, or maybe a card in the beginning. “Casablanca” has that. “Star Wars” has that. Of course, with Star Wars, you’re being welcomed into a completely crazy, woo-hoo world that came out of George Lucas’s mind. But I think that for a film that takes place in 1977 to start once again with the card, “There was a dictatorship taking place in Brazil”—I thought that I should really avoid that and instead grossly underplay, almost in a poetic way, the seriousness of what we were going through.
The Portuguese word is . . .
“Pirraça.” It’s a wonderful word, quite old-fashioned. It usually means someone who’s teasing someone else, in a mean-spirited way. Someone who has the power to play a prank on you. And that prank might go overboard.
I never planned the script for “The Secret Agent.” I did not have a map. I’ve seen some by colleagues and friends—it almost looks like algebra. The script wrote itself, in a way. I was sometimes surprised at some of the twists and turns that it took.
No outlines?
There were no outlines. The script stemmed from the desire to dramatize some situations and also the desire to shoot those scenes. I was salivating at even the thought of shooting the whole sequence in the registry office, with all those public servants, the wooden floors and the telephones. I just love that whole universe.
You’ve said that the film isn’t about memory—it’s about forgetting. And, in this conversation, you’ve suggested that we live in a post-truth era. How is that collective amnesia playing out in Brazil?
Unfortunately, it’s a very strong part of Brazilian life. TV has traditionally belonged to one group—the Globo group. And they have dictated, in a way, behavior and perception of truth, of politics. Globo always supported the military dictatorship, right from the beginning. In 1984, when people were fighting for general elections for the first time after the coup, Globo ignored almost a million people in downtown São Paulo. And that’s the way that society is framed, I think, in Brazil. My mother being a historian, she was always telling me where to look. But many people are not like that. And I think that we migrated from just manipulation of power to something that is completely out of control.
In a country that, for political reasons, has erased, or tried to forget, or tried not to remember important aspects of history, the mere fact of remembering something might land you an accusation of being a communist or a radical, just because you are saying, “But that’s not how it happened.” And I think there is a strong resistance against reality.
It’s happening in the U.S. It’s happening in Brazil and in Europe. There is a group of society, usually from the far right, and they are fighting reality every day. They wake up in the morning and go to sleep fighting reality. We are now entering Philip K. Dick territory—memory implants. You don’t actually have to implant a chip. You can actually choose whatever reality you want to choose.
In Brazil, we had Bolsonaro saying that COVID was nothing—“Get off your asses and go to work today. It’s nothing. If you’re an athletic type, like I am, nothing will happen to you.” It was a very dark period we went through. I’m just happy that it’s over. The right seems to be lost now. Bolsonaro is in jail. And it feels we are making more sense now as a society.
Under Bolsonaro, there was a concerted effort not to have your film submitted to the Academy.
Back in 2016, there was a clear act of sabotage against “Aquarius.” The month we premièred at Cannes in competition, the Ministry of Culture had been extinguished, because Dilma Rousseff was impeached. It was all a cynical coup d’état. [Rousseff, a former guerrilla turned politician, had been elected to succeed the longtime leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. She faced corruption charges that her supporters argued were politically motivated.] The voting in Congress was broadcast live on a Sunday afternoon—one of the most grotesque moments in Brazilian history, because it really was about the anger from the right at being shut out of power through democratic elections since 2002. Bolsonaro himself, as a congressman, dedicated his vote for impeachment to the guy whose unit tortured Dilma in prison when she was twenty-two.
So, a few weeks later, we went to Cannes with “Aquarius.” [Kleber began to cry, then continued.] Sorry. We went to Cannes, and we did a protest on the red carpet—just holding bits of paper. We went into the theatre. Two hours and twenty minutes later, we came out, and we understood that there was a firestorm in Brazil because of the protest.
The far right just became very mad at me. And then the people who took power, who extinguished the Ministry of Culture, they were the ones who got to pick which Brazilian film to submit for the Oscars. Friends and colleagues withdrew their films in solidarity, saying there was only one film to be picked that year. And then they picked the most unknown, most mysterious film. It was a scandal.
How has “The Secret Agent” been received? Not just in Brazil but in countries like Spain, where people are also still grappling with questions of historical memory.
I went to San Sebastián, and I talked to cinephiles and critics. They feel that it’s very strong for the Spanish, particularly because of Franco. Spain still has many families that would rather not talk about what happened.
And many mass graves.
Yeah. It’s a very strong theme in Spain. It’s a very strong theme in Chile. Dilma was the one who put together a truth-and-reconciliation committee, which Bolsonaro immediately hijacked when he came into power.
Brazilian society isn’t particularly pragmatic. Some societies will say, “This is what we have to do, and we will do it.” Brazil is more, like, “Oh, I don’t know, let’s just move on and let’s not talk about unpleasant things.” I’ve heard that in family circles. I’ve heard that from politicians, and I heard that from Bolsonaro. But he didn’t put it as nicely as I just did. He said, “Only dogs look for bones.” ♦
THE NEW YORKER
