Four-time Oscar nominee The Secret Agent: Filmmaker Kleber Mendonca Filho on art and politics

Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonca Filho said scriptwriting is the hardest part of the process. It’s an exercise in deep immersion but it’s lonely.

When it he showed the first 15 pages of his film, The Secret Agent, to his wife and producer Emilie Lesclaux and their good friends, he knew he was onto something.

The scene is set a petrol station along a back stretch of road in Brazil, in 1977 and at the height of the military dictatorship that would rule the country for two decades.

Armando, played by internationally recognised star Wagner Moura, pulls in for some fuel, and after a quick conversation with the attendant about the dead body lying nearby, which the authorities have not bothered to deal with for days, a police car pulls in.

The cop interrogates Armando about himself, trying to find something wrong with him or his car, and when there isn’t, just outright asks for a bribe. All Armando has to give the police officer is a cigarette, and he’s let off the hook. The cops drive away, barely glancing at the corpse.

In that tense exchange, Mendonca Filho has captured the petty corruption, the repressive political atmosphere and the rot at the heart of Brazil’s then-authoritarian government.

The Secret Agent premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May and in the past eight months, it has broken well past its borders. The Brazilians love it, oh, yes they do, but it’s also won plaudits all over the world, and nabbed four Oscar nominations including for best picture.

Its political threads have resonated strongly around the world.

“I’ve been travelling with the film for months, and it does seem to have hit a nerve, certainly in Brazil, but that’s a very national thing, but then we can look at the United States and there are very strong reactions from the US,” Mendonca Filho told The Nightly.

When Mendonca Filho conceived and wrote the film about a persecuted academic during the military dictatorship, he thought he was writing a story isolated to that era.

“Then I began to realise that this film was actually coming from these horrible, dark years my country went through in the past 10 years, when (Jair) Bolsonaro was democratically elected president of Brazil.”

Bolsonaro, who was shafted out of office in the 2022 election and was later convicted of plotting a coup to stay in power, was a right-wing leader who evoked and attempted to reframe the former military dictatorship in his lean towards authoritarian rule.

The Secret Agent challenges Bolsonaro’s narrative, as well as that of segment of the right-wing in Brazil who have tried to diminish the brutality of that regime. So too did the Walter Salles-directed film I’m Still Here, which won best international feature at last year’s Oscars.

“In talking to Walter, he probably now accepts that I’m Still Here also came from when you’re trying to understand where the wind is blowing,” Mendonca Filho recalled.

“My films have always been very natural reactions to certain atmospheres that were taking place, and that’s a beautiful thing about literature, cinema and artistic expression. You pick up on things, and then you find yourself writing, and months later you realise where it’s coming from.

“When I was writing, I was giving The Secret Agent a certain logic which I thought was in the 1970s, but, in fact, the Bolsonaro years were trying to bring back the logic of the military dictatorship.

“Now I’m talking in the name of Walter and I shouldn’t, but that’s how I think these two films came about, and they hit a very broad nerve in Brazil. Of course, there are things taking place now in the world, which strengthens the overall feel of The Secret Agent, right now in the United States specifically.”

Any piece of art that explores, questions or even portrayals historical events, especially ones that are still contested in the present, could trigger hostile responses.

“In Brazil, if you remember something, it becomes a political act,” Mendonca Filho explained, and with The Secret Agent so steeped in historical memory, it has become a target for the country’s right-wing commentariat.

Mendonca Filho said one “conservative journalist” in an interview accused him of “remembering things” and injecting political matters into a film that should “stick to entertainment”.

The far-right, the filmmaker explained, were upset with The Secret Agent for daring to be entertaining and truthful.

Mendonca Filho was earlier this week listening to a podcast which had pointed out that when I’m Still Here was attacked by the right, it was accused of exaggerating or lying about political activists being “disappeared” by the dictatorship. Now, 12 months on, the tactic has changed.

“With The Secret Agent, they changed the discourse, and it’s more like, ‘Yes, it was bad, but let’s move on’,” Mendonca Filho said.

Those right-wing commentators who are opposed to his films wrote op-eds challenging the notion that a film such as The Secret Agent should receive public money.

It’s a common tactic in a culture war to assault the very idea that the arts should have public funding, especially when it’s used to express perspectives that veer from some grand, nationalistic narrative.

“It’s probably the most stupid thing I’ve ever read,” he said of the op-eds. “They’re very much against the idea that a film made with public funding should look at horrible things that happened in the past, and telling it to the world, because it ‘makes us feel bad’.

“How did they publish this? How did anybody allow someone to have such an embarrassing day after something like this is published?”

While Mendonca Kleber didn’t foresee the level of attention and reactions to The Secret Agent, he’s very happy with everything it’s achieved.

And isn’t that the point of memory and storytelling?

The Secret Agent is in cinemas