Since its first screening at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it took home awards for Best Actor and Best Director, Kleber Mendonça’s “The Secret Agent” has been making waves on the festival circuit. Featured in this year’s Telluride at Dartmouth lineup, the film was screened in Spaulding Auditorium on Sept. 20.
The film follows Marcelo (Wagner Moura), a widowed professor fleeing a turbulent past. He returns to Recife, the city in northeast Brazil where his young son lives, in hopes of reuniting with him and starting over. Although the premise seems straightforward, the 158-minute film is layered and evocative.
In an interview with the Brazilian news outlet Poder360, Mendonça said “The Secret Agent” is his most ambitious and expensive project to date with a budget of around $5 million. The film is unique for its setting of Recife — in my experience, it’s rare to find people outside of Brazil who can name cities beyond the major hubs of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The tension between north and south plays a key role in the film, particularly in political conflicts over urban development and deep-rooted social inequality.
Carnival, Brazil’s greatest national holiday and a renowned cultural symbol, serves as a vibrant backdrop for the story. This celebration of Brazilian culture was also present at the Cannes premiere. Mendonça and the cast arrived accompanied by a frevo parade, an energetic musical style from northeastern Brazil associated with Carnival.
The film uses a sprawling cast and a script of more than 160 pages brought to life through an international co-production with Germany, France and the Netherlands, according to the interview. Rather than rushing through the sweeping plot, Mendonça carefully pieces together fragments of Marcelo’s fictional life and situates them within the historical realities of Brazil at the time — gradually revealing an intricate and deeply intelligent narrative.
With its subtleties, the film reflects the systems and histories that shaped the 1977 Brazil Marcelo navigates. These include the legacies of African and European migration, the chronic underfunding of public educational institutions and the lack of accountability for those in power.
Moura, best known internationally for roles such as Pablo Escobar in “Narcos,” balances moments of raw intensity with tenderness — especially when interacting with his young son. The plot is sprinkled with absurdity and humor: searches for fake passports, a witty grandmother who also offers shelter to fugitives, and a lone human leg haunting a city park at night. Yet, even as the narrative playfully leans into comedy and espionage, there’s a sharpness to it all.
As noted by Dartmouth professor of film and media studies Gerd Gemünden in a recorded conversation with Mendonça shown after the screening, the film questions what gets archived as well as whose voices are lost along the way. While “The Secret Agent” follows Marcelo’s search for documents related to his mother, the events of 1977 are narrated by two young women in the present day listening to tapes of eyewitness testimonies and piecing the story together.
This dual narrative highlights the fragile relationship between memory and history. It shows how the past is constantly reconstructed through preservation. In the same interview with Poder360, Mendonça explained that his goal was to create a “mystery film” full of “intrigue, action and violence,” but he also wanted to create a “deeply Brazilian film, full of love and affection for people.” This balance between chaos and tenderness gives the film its unique tone, inviting audiences to laugh, reflect and even cry as the story unfolds.
By the time the credits rolled, the theater was rife with laughter and quiet contemplation. Instead of tying everything up neatly, “The Secret Agent” leaves audiences uncertain about what to think — or how to feel. The sound of Brazilian Portuguese in a Hanover auditorium also felt quietly subversive. Despite its Brazilian roots, the film’s meditation on whose voices are remembered and whose are erased feels universal and urgent.
