O agente secreto

Brazil, 1977. A corpse lies in the street for days without anyone showing concern, least of all the police. Hitmen drive to a dam in the middle of the night and drop a body into the water. Human remains are found inside the belly of a shark. No wonder that the opening scene of O AGENTE SECRETO describes the period setting, midway through the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985, as “a time of great mischief”. Less interested in a history lesson than evoking what life was like back then, Kleber Mendonça Filho conjures a mood of pervasive paranoia, corruption and violence. With novelistic sweep, he brings together a large number of characters in a tangle of narrative strands that gradually converge around Marcelo, a university professor who is on the run after getting on the wrong side of an oligarch. The introduction of a timeline set in the present, in which a scholar attempts to reconstruct Marcelo’s story from surviving evidence, reflects Mendonça Filho’s own effort at salvaging historical memory. Cinema plays a key role here, both in this endeavour and within the narrative itself, as an artistic means of sharing and remembering stories, and as a physical space for collective dreaming. (Giovanni Marchini Camia)

Kleber Mendonça Filho (selection): A MENINA DO ALGODAO (2003, K), VINIL VERDE (2004, K), ELETRODOMÉSTICA (2005, K), CRITICO (2008), LUZ INDUSTRIAL MAGICA (2009), RECIFE FRIO (2010,K), O SOM AO REDOR (2012, K), A COPA DO MUNDO NO RECIFE (2015,K), AQUARIUS (2016), BACURAU (2019, CO-DIRECTOR), RETRATOS FANTASMAS (2023)