"My 'Jaws' Obsession Had No Boundaries": Kleber Mendonca Filho on "The Secret Agent"

"Kleber Mendonça Filho has never been shy explicating how personal memories have seeped into his professional work. Born and raised in Recife (capital of the Brazilian state of Pernambuco), the filmmaker has consistently dived into its history and, in doing so, his own history as well. While technically a narrative (featuring a remarkable cast led by Wagner Moura), The Secret Agent is also a movie about tumultuous events in and around the filmmaker's hometown. Anyone who spoke out against the military dictatorship's brutality was relentlessly harassed, spied on and, in some instances, murdered."

"An adolescent when these events unfolded, film-critic-turned-filmmaker Mendonça Filho uses The Secret Agent to explore both his obsessions with the period and adoration for its popular moviegoing culture. In his Cannes coverage from earlier this year, Vadim Rizov observed that " Secret Agent is something like Mendonça Filho's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood , an immaculately immersive and visibly expensive reconstruction of the filmmaker's formative years." Like Tarantino's film, The Secret Agent uses historical events as its framework and moviedom as its lifeblood. But where Tarantino was enamored with revisionist history as a means of righting the past's wrongs (the murder of Sharon Tate), Mendonça Filho uses cinema to draw us into the subconscious of the Brazilian people."

"A widower and former scientist turned enemy of the state, Armando (Moura) is desperate to reunite with his nine-year-old son Fernando, a young boy living with his grandparents who continuously begs his grandfather (Armando's father-in-law, a projectionist at Cinema São Luiz) to take him to see (1975). At the same time, a dead shark with a human leg protruding out of a gash in its stomach has washed up nearby, drawing interest from the local authorities. While shark attacks have been"

Kleber Mendonça Filho draws heavily on personal memories and Recife's local history to recreate a period of military repression and popular moviegoing culture. The film situates political violence and surveillance alongside intimate family dynamics and childhood longing. Armando, a widower and former scientist labeled an enemy of the state, seeks reunion with his nine-year-old son Fernando, who lives with his grandparents and is obsessed with cinema. The narrative juxtaposes quotidian practices of cinema exhibition with shocking public incidents, using movies as both refuge and a lens into collective memory and the Brazilian subconscious.

Read at Filmmaker Magazine