In the intriguing start ofThe secret agentArmando, the widowed protagonist played by Wagner Moura, stops at a gas station on his way to Recife. A corpse lies on the ground, seemingly unconcerned by the station attendant. It's Carnival. There's violence, but nothing stops. When the police arrive, they're more interested in the protagonist than the deceased. In his most ambitious feature film to date, Kleber Mendonça Filho It portrays Brazil in the 1970s as a sum of contradictions marked by the normalization of (not only) state violence. The film, nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture and Best International Feature FilmThe film focuses on an underground militant living in a dissidents' safe house who begins working under a false identity at the Civil Registry and plans to flee the country with his son.

Aquarium (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.