02 · 27 · 26

Kleber Mendonça Filho: cinefilia y memoria en EL AGENTE SECRETO

Alonso Díaz de la Vega

The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto, 2025) is a film about many things. At first glance, it is about a man persecuted in 1977 for not allowing a businessman to turn his work, science, into a business. This entangles him with revolutionaries, corrupt police officers, a hairy leg that roams the Brazilian city of Recife; also, indirectly, with history students who rescue the memory of those years, and finally with cinema itself: a device that records imaginaries, places, people, and freezes the present for anyone who wants to see it again in real time.

This last theme has been fundamental in the filmography of Kleber Mendonça Filho, a genuinely cinephile filmmaker who trained first in criticism, then in short films, and finally in feature films that have been presented at some of the most important festivals in the world, including Cannes, where he has competed three times for the Palme d'Or. Thanks to The Secret Agent, Mendonça Filho won the award for Best Director.

I didn't want to miss the opportunity to talk to the director without talking, above all, about cinema itself: names such as Scorsese, Rocha, Carpenter, and Oliveira came up, because Mendonça Filho's imagination is incapable of distinguishing between one image and another; This led us to discuss changes in Brazilian film culture and his more or less recent documentary Retratos Fantasmas (2023), which addresses similar themes (at least in terms of cinema) to those in The Secret Agent. The full interview, edited for clarity, can be read below.

FICM: You were a critic. You've been a great film buff, I would say; it's something that comes across in your films. Could you imagine being a filmmaker without being a film buff? Could you make films without watching films?

Kleber Mendonça Filho: There is a strange phenomenon with filmmakers who take pride in not watching movies, and I find this distance from films and cultural production in society, in the world, very strange. It's not part of a filmmaker's life; it's like being a writer and having no contact with literature. For me, cinema is a constant flow of ideas, images, the history of society, the history of cinema itself. And for me, it's like food, like a constant nourishment of ideas and poetry and information, too. For me, it's very natural to be a film buff. I think I've been a film buff since I was a kid. It's almost like that dialogue from Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990). “As far as I can remember, I have always wanted to be a filmmaker.” But I think there are many ways to work in cinema. I don't know. Maybe there's a way to make movies without knowing cinema. I don't rule out that possibility now.

FICM: Something you've talked about a lot these days is the impurity of The Secret Agent. And I think the same can be said about your filmography in general. I see that you have a great love for genre cinema, B movies. People often think that genre cinema can't express complex ideas or political ideas.

KMF:  When I was young and had dreams of making movies, there was a certain way of thinking in Brazilian cinema among older, more conservative people. Because Brazilian cinema has a glorious history with Cinema Novo in the early 1960s. A very, very important movement, with incredible films by Glauber Rocha, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Carlos Diegues. And this is a political movement in a world very divided between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Cold War. There was a very skeptical movement against American cinema. Hollywood and American cinema have a very intimate relationship with genre cinema, science fiction, fantasy, and, truthfully, Soviet cinema also has its very interesting relationship with fantasy, but not like Hollywood. And I, in my childhood, grew up watching a lot of American genre science fiction films. Television series. It was also normal for my generation, it was natural, it was part of life. And when I was a young man with dreams of being a filmmaker and a critic and a film buff, genre cinema was very, very important to me. And not just for the moments of horror and blood. For me, for example, John Carpenter is a very strong influence because his films were available on VHS in theaters. More available than Glauber Rocha's films.

I must say, unfortunately, that Glauber Rocha was a discovery for me in the 1980s and 1990s, in a very loving way. Each film was very, very important to me. There was an aesthetic impact, and also from Carpenter, which I believe is still present in all my films today. When I started with short films, my first experiences were very clearly genre films, horror films, and the reaction at Brazilian festivals to these short films was one of mistrust. "It's an imitation of American films. It's not Brazilian. There are much richer themes in Brazil to address than horror or fantasy films!" But over many years, I think we've had a change in perception, because Brazilian criticism also changed, and now we had young critics who were also from the same generation that grew up with genre films. And I think that today Brazilian cinema is much more impure and much more open to horror or fantasy films. Or not just films with deeply realistic social themes. And at the same time, I think the films I've made are a mixture of all this; they are also realistic and social. But not only that.

FICM: Listening to you talk about cinema and cinephilia and thinking about much of what we see, for example, in Ghost Portraits or The Secret Agent, I get the impression that for you cinema and cinephilia themselves are a form of memory, which is also one of the themes of The Secret Agent.

KMF: Yes, for me it's impossible to separate the love of cinema from the relationships in your personal life. It's not possible. It's not possible to be just an academic and analyze films scientifically. I think this is very good and necessary for me. But the personal relationship with art, cultural expression, which I believe cinema is, is impossible to ignore. My relationship with films is almost like markers on the timeline of my life. And for me, it's very normal to see cinema as not only a social, aesthetic, cultural, and historical experience, but also a personal one. There are many people who talk about cinema with a deep sentimental, emotional connection, which for me is very rich information to know. For me, cinephilia is a mixture of many aspects that are rich and important to understand. Not only the aesthetic, historical, and social experience, but also the significance of very personal and emotional elements, such as a book or music. It's the same thing.

FICM: We're running out of time, but I'd like to ask one last question related to this idea of emotion and memory. I think your filmography has been largely dedicated to making your city and even your home a cinematic image.

KMF: It's not a new idea. There's a film that's one of my favorites, which is Manoel de Oliveira's Visita ou Memórias e Confissões (1982). It's about his home. It was made in 1981, shortly before he left his home, and it was a bit like what happened with Retratos fantasmas.

This is a film for me, for my family. I had so many film images made in this apartment and, little by little, I saw that it could be a very strange montage of different times in the same space. And for me, this is a very rich expression of cinema. It's the same idea for society and cities: there are ghost portraits. It's like a family album with lots of photographs and images from trips. A pastiche of 16mm, 35mm. Of a circle of different points of view of the same geographical space. For me, it's an exercise in film editing that interests me a lot. That's why Retratos fantasmas is a film about my house, but it's not exactly about my house, not just about people or spaces, but about film editing.