Nelida Nassar  06.16.2026

Beirut Brazilian Film Festival in its decade long and 8th edition opens with none other than the filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho’s latest “The Secret Agent.” A demanding and popular director who triumphed at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2025 receiving unprecedented four awards for Best Director, Best Actor, the Art House Cinema, and the FIPRESCI Prize. This unsettling thriller set against the backdrop of a military dictatorship that long plagued his country (1964-1985) has become a cultural phenomenon in Brazil. It is been released in Beirut and the Arab world simultaneously this evening. 

I had the privilege of speaking to Mr. Pablo Romero the head of the Culture and Press Section, Embassy of Brazil in Beirut who opined how director Kleber Mendonça Filho used a fractured, puzzle-play structure to explore how memory, history, and trauma are negotiated, hidden, and sometimes erased under authoritarian regimes. He added how important it is to preserve memory to encourage and foster true reconciliation. Its selection is most auspicious for Lebanon.

It is quite likely that the recent presidential term of Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2023), reviving the specter of dictatorship, hastened the production of the film. In Mendonça Filho’s opinion, “The Secret Agent” goes off in all sorts of directions.” And one can hardly disagree with him. Or criticize him for it. Written in the wake of research conducted for his previous documentary “Ghost Portraits,” which focused on Recife’s movie theaters, “The Secret Agent” is a thriller tinged with nostalgia, as disorienting as it is captivating. Composed with polyphonic abundance and pop distancing to establish a kind of typology, solar and ghostly, nonchalant and monstrous, of tropical fascism.

Initially, the brilliant filmmaker takes us back to 1977, following Armando Solimões (the formidable Wagner Moura, winner of the Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival), a professor from São Paulo, who returns to settle in Recife. He hopes to find his son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes), who has been living with his maternal grandparents since his wife’s death. From the very first scene, Mendonça Filho’s dark humor shines through. Stopping at a gas station, Armando notices that people are paying little attention to a corpse that has been lying under a cardboard box for several days. In the midst of a military dictatorship, this seems rather commonplace. Moreover, with Carnival in full swing, murders are on the rise. Later, the director takes us to present-day Brazil, where Flávia (Laura Lufési), a history student interested in the resistance (a recurring theme for the director), discovers Armando’s fate through newspaper archives and audio cassettes. While the two scenes from different historical periods do cause some shifts in tone, these brief returns to the present don’t hinder the narrative’s progression. Even better, they introduce a character from the past and lead “The Secret Agent” toward a melancholic finale. However, the flashback sequence stands on its own, so rich, dense, and complex.

Boasting meticulous art direction and cinematography reminiscent of 1970s films, particularly those of Martin Scorsese and Carlo Di Palma, “The Secret Agent” presents a diverse cast of characters that the discreet protagonist encounters over the course of his days. Under the assumed name of Marcelo Alves, Armando takes up residence with Donna Sebastiana (the flamboyant Tânia Maria), who rents rooms to political refugees. While the atmosphere is convivial in this place where a two-headed cat roams (Mendonça Filho enjoys surprising the viewer), a certain tension is palpable.

When they’re not busy persecuting a German refugee (the late Udo Kier), corrupt police chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes) and his sons (Italo Martins and Igor de Araújo) investigate a hairy leg found in a shark’s stomach. At the São Luz cinema, where Armando’s stepfather (Carlos Francisco) works as a projectionist, Jaws sends shivers down the spines of the audience. Drawing inspiration from the success of Steven Spielberg’s film (Jaws) and a wild urban legend, Mendonça Filho delivers a sequence worthy of a B-movie horror flick, illustrating police brutality with a healthy dose of absurd and irreverent humor. This unsettles the viewer, but the director never loses sight of the tragedy threatening Armando. Learning from Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), the resistance leader, that he must flee Brazil, Armando immediately begins searching for information about his mother, who disappeared when he was a child, at the social security archives where he works.

From then on, Mendonça Filho masterfully orchestrates a cat-and-mouse game in the bustling streets of Recife. As the net closes in on Armando, the pace quickens and the tension intensifies until it becomes unbearable. Depicting the climate of violence that reigned in Brazil at the time, the filmmaker salutes the heroes of the resistance so that they do not sink into oblivion.

The film represented Brazil and was nominated at the 2026 Oscars. A masterstroke, which has become a cultural phenomenon, it perfectly illustrates the renewed vitality of Brazilian cinema. From his hometown in the Northeast, which features prominently in his filmography, the 57-year-old Kleber,” as everyone calls him, enjoys serene success. As he has established himself as the spearhead of the Brazilian cinematic renaissance. Mendonça Filho’s fourth feature film confirms the feeling that he is the best thing to happen to Brazilian cinema since Glauber Rocha (1939-1981), both men filming from their native Northeast. The two directors are, however, hardly comparable. Rocha, a leading figure of the 1960s “Cinema Novo,” was a poetic and radical genius of unsurpassed audacity. Kleber Mendonça Filho, who plays more on the romantic side of a drama, a satire, an intriguingly laid-back espionage film, and a recreation of a time and place, with expressionistic and surreal nonetheless flourishes delivers a masterpiece with “The Secret Agent,” a landmark in the history of cinema.

https://metropoliscinema.net/eventProgram/189/8th+Brazilian+Film+Festival