Kleber Mendonça Filho: "The far right in Brazil wants to bring back the military, racism, misogyny, and homophobia."

BarcelonaAquarium (premiered in 2016 in our house) as Doña Clara) and Bacurau (2019) made Kleber Mendonça Filho (Recife, 1968) the name to watch in modern Brazilian cinema, but the four Oscar nominations ofThe secret agentThe Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor, represent the international acclaim of this former film critic. His new film, which premieres this Friday, travels to Brazil in 1977 to follow the escape of an idealistic engineer (magnificently portrayed by Wagner Moura) who is hiding from the powers that be in a corrupt and authoritarian state. Surprising and full of ideas, the film is one of the sensations of auteur cinema.

Set in 1970s Brazil, the film captures a collective state of anxiety that is very reminiscent of our current times. Is that why I wanted to set The secret agent at the moment?

— Some of my favorite films have an overall sense of atmosphere that's hard to achieve. For example, Do the right thing.Spike Lee's film conveys the atmosphere of a very hot and tense summer in New York, with many heated exchanges between people. The film is like an explosion, and I like that. And I always ask myself: how do I achieve this? I think I achieved it in my first film [Sounds of the neighborhood[of 2012]. In The secret agent I wanted to travel back in time, but not far, to a past I could remember, the one from when I was a nine-year-old boy. And I remember many things that were different from now, from the noise of the traffic, which was much louder because of the diesel and gasoline engines, to the smell of the pipes, the colors of the clothes and the cars... The city center was much more vibrant. And all of this came to mind while I was doing research to direct Ghost portraits.

Is your documentary about missing cinemas in downtown Recife, right?

— Yes. I looked at a lot of photographs from that time, newspapers... And the most interesting thing wasn't what I learned, but that it reconnected me with my memories of my family, the city, our way of life, my friends, my girlfriends... So many things. That's when I felt I could write. The secret agentThe important thing is that in recent years, in Brazil, after many years of progress and improvements, everything suddenly stopped and began to regress toward the far right. And the far right is crazy. They want a masquerade of the past, to bring back the military, racism, misogyny, and homophobia. And I realized that, while I was writing a film about the past, I was actually writing a film about the present.

The memory of the past and the inheritance passed from parents to children is very important in the film. In fact, one of the film's segments is significantly titled, Blood transfusion.

— We receive a lot of information from our elders throughout our lives, but not just from our parents. I find that very interesting and beautiful. Not all of it is good, of course; you can also receive bad information from the past. But I like the idea that we are the people we live with, the people we encounter. And I deeply believe in film as a vehicle for conveying information and feelings, because watching movies, reading books, and talking to people shaped me. It's not just a blood transfusion; it's a transfusion of life.

There's a strangely emotional moment in the film that seems to echo the documentary about vanished cinemas we mentioned earlier: when we discover that the protagonist's son now works in a hospital that used to be the cinema where he saw Shark as a child.

— Yes. Both. Ghost portraits as The secret agent They talk about time, and also about what time does to people and cities. You can approach it with nostalgia or drama, or simply try to understand what it means. I'm more inclined to think, "That's just how it is." If you film it in Panavision with beautiful music, it might seem nostalgic, but it's like meeting an old friend and realizing they've changed. They don't look the same as they did at 17 or 21, but that's life. The little boy in the film has grown into a doctor working in a hospital that performs blood transfusions, which, it turns out, used to be a movie theater. It's a lot of information, but it makes sense in the context of life.

The film's opening is extraordinary. The image of the corpse rotting for days at a gas station because the police still haven't come to collect it is very powerful. Is it inspired by a real case?

— No, I made it up, but it's part of the logic of Carnival in Brazil. When it's Carnival, especially where I'm from, everything stops. If you're doing pre-production on a film, the Thursday before Carnival, everyone stops working. And even though they're supposed to go back to work the following Wednesday, they'll probably go back on Thursday, or maybe Friday. And since they're going to go back on Friday, maybe it's better to wait until after the weekend. That's the logic of Carnival. I've wanted to shoot that opening scene for a long time, since the '90s. And when I started showing the film to my friends, I was afraid they'd say the gas station scene wasn't necessary, but nobody said that. Everyone loved it.

The protagonist hides from the authorities and ends up living in a building where all the neighbors are also fugitives, a small oasis of freedom in times of darkness.

— In difficult times for Brazilian society, like the dictatorship or even during the Bolsonaro years, people formed groups to protect themselves and feel safer. It's a support network to ward off depression. The most curious thing is that when I found the building where we filmed, which I love, I discovered that one of the neighbors, a woman over 50, had lived there her whole life. She explained that it had been a building where many people from the south sought refuge. So, during the 60s and 70s, it had a reputation as a communist stronghold. They called it the...red building.

The secret agent It's a film with many stories within it. One of the most shocking involves a leg found inside a shark's belly, which then begins attacking people.

— It serves as a tribute to horror films. I've always wanted to make a monster movie. stop motionBut the important thing is that it shows people's irreverence in confronting the military regime. During the dictatorship, there was censorship in the newspapers. If the police attacked the gay community in a park, the newspaper couldn't report it. So a couple of journalists invented a code, and instead of reporting that police officers were attacking gay people in the park, they wrote that a hairy leg was attacking people. It's absurd, but it reminds me of a Czech humor book that was published after the Prague Spring of 1968: the reactions to the Soviet invasion were very funny, but they were coded, because otherwise their authors would have been arrested. It's a way of releasing tension through humor.

Speaking of tension, the most thrilling scene in the film is when Wagner Moura's character flees from men who want to kill him. It's a bit... suspense action with an amazing, almost disconcerting ending.

— My assistant director was very worried about this sequence, and during filming he kept asking me if I had a plan B. But I didn't. I didn't want to film the ambush. We already know how it's going to happen: he arrives in his car, gets out, and a guy approaches him from behind and shoots him. From the beginning of the sequence, you know how it's going to end. Why film it? I find it more enriching to discover the ending by consulting some documents. Our lives are linear, but over time, information ceases to be, and that seems more interesting to me. Accessing information with a click in a database is a powerful idea. I know there are people who don't like the ending of the film or the character. And I'm sorry, but it says more about the film's intentions than seeing him get out of the car and have someone shoot him four times.