When the Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho was writing his latest movie in 2021, he felt shame about the situation in his homeland as it took “a sharp turn to the right” under the then president, Jair Bolsonaro. “Well-informed friends … would pat you on the back and say ‘I feel for you’,” the film-maker recalls.
Four years later as the film hits big screens, Bolsonaro is out of the picture and Mendonça’s mood has changed. “I am very proud of what is happening in Brazil,” he says after recently seeing the far-right populist receive a 27-year prison sentence for masterminding a failed coup.
The bungled putsch culminated in the 8 January 2023 attacks in Brasília when rioters wrecked the capital after leftwing candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva beat Bolsonaro in the election. Mendonça calls Bolsonaro’s conviction a sign that justice has prevailed.
“And I do hope he goes to jail,” he adds, rejecting rightwing calls for Bolsonaro’s sins to be forgiven and forgotten through a pardon. “[We came] very close to … the collapse of society. [There can be] no amnesty. It’s all very clear, I think,” says the film-maker, citing “overwhelmingly shocking” evidence of Bolsonaro’s guilt.
Remembering is at the heart of Mendonça’s new film, The Secret Agent, a gripping political thriller set in 1977, the 13th year of Brazil’s brutal two-decade military dictatorship and also the year Bolsonaro graduated from the Agulhas Negras military academy, a South American West Point, before starting his improbable march towards the presidency.
The film, which earned Mendonça the best director award at this year’s Cannes film festival and has been called a masterpiece, tells the story of Armando, a good-natured academic who is forced into hiding after clashing with a reptilian regime official who orders his murder.
The professor, played by the Civil War star Wagner Moura, finds shelter in a safe house for dissidents and social outcasts in Recife, the north-eastern city where Mendonça grew up.
Mendonça, 56, set out to make a period thriller rather than a classic dictatorship movie about “young guerrilla fighters robbing a bank to fund actions against the dictatorship”.
But when friends watched the electrifying movie, reactions suggested he had made a film infused with recent history, which “was actually about the last few years living in Brazil” under Bolsonaro, a paratrooper before he became a politician, who openly pined for a return to military rule.
When Bolsonaro took office in 2019 and began packing his administration with military men and reviving the violent, illiberal rhetoric of the 1964-85 dictatorship, it felt like “an exercise in fetishism with a long-lost Brazil” from half a century earlier, Mendonça says.
Bolsonaro’s persecution of the arts harked back to the military period when cherished cultural figures fled overseas. Bolsonaro’s closure of the culture ministry – now reversed by Lula – “was one of the biggest attacks against the country I’ve ever seen,” Mendonça says.
“It’s proof he doesn’t understand the country at all – and it felt so, so aggressive. That was something I just found awful – such an act of violence,” says the film-maker, who spent part of his adolescence at school in Essex in the early 80s, travelling into London to watch films in Leicester Square. (The Secret Agent features two hat tips to the anglophile director’s fondness for the UK: a cameo from the British consul to Rio, Anjoum Noorani, and a reference to the University of Leeds.)
Bolsonaro’s days in power now appear over, with the disgraced 70-year-old expected to start serving his sentence next month – the same time as The Secret Agent goes on general release in Brazil.
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Lula, in contrast, seems well placed to win a historic fourth term in the October 2026 election with Brazil’s leaderless right in disarray over Donald Trump’s backfiring campaign to derail Bolsonaro’s trial with tariffs and sanctions.
“Today, I don’t really see the right as functional unless … they come up with some kind of AI character [candidate] … and maybe that will make sense in a year,” Mendonça jokes.
But the director frets about the Brazilian tradition of “self-inflicted amnesia” by which his country has repeatedly fail to scrutinise traumatic moments from its past. Unlike Argentina and Chile, Brazil has largely allowed military officials to escape punishment for the bloodshed they caused.
“It seems to be the way the Brazilian psyche operates,” Mendonça says, remembering the 1979 amnesty law that let human rights violators off the hook for dictatorship-era crimes.
“Maybe it made sense at the time. But looking back now … I don’t think it was a good idea … It’s almost like the default behaviour [in Brazil] is amnesty: ‘Serial killer kills 87’. ‘Oh, he had a mother … He has two kids. Let’s go easy on him!’.”
In The Secret Agent’s final scene, a researcher from the present hands a memory stick to the runaway academic’s son containing devastating details of his father’s plight. “You can see panic in the son’s face,” Mendonça says. “You know, [it’s like]: ‘Get this thing out of here because I can’t deal with this. I’ve been taught not to deal with this.’”
