Undercover No Longer: The Secret Agent and Kleber Mendonça Filho

Brazilian critic-turned-filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho has built a sterling reputation over 20 years at festivals and in cinephile circles. With The Secret Agent, his twisty, prize-winning thriller, he seems poised to cross over into even wider recognition. Using clips from his past films, spanning melodrama, documentary, and horror, always with an eye on politics, this session will highlight some of Mendonça’s abiding themes and artistic signatures—with the goal of opening up even more inroads into his newest work.

Recommended viewing: We’ll view excerpts from Neighboring Sounds (2012) and Pictures of Ghosts (2023)—two films that merited far larger audiences in the United States. Yet Mendonça Filho’s entire body of work rewards discovery, including his fascinating character study Aquarius (2016), featuring Sônia Braga, and Bacurau (2019), his violent, sci-fi inflected parable of a popular uprising in an Amazonian village. All are streaming on multiple services.