The new film from writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho is the second Brazilian film in two years to make the best picture line-up after Walter Selles's drama I'm Still Here achieved the same feat last year. Like that film, it explores a tumultuous period in the country's history – the military dictatorship that existed between 1964 and 1985 – although unlike it, it tells a fictional story inspired by the atmosphere of the time rather than a true story.
"I have very vivid memories of what the dictatorship was," he explained in conversation with Radio Times. "And I also directed a film in 2018 [political thriller Marighella] that took place during the dictatorship. So I had studied a lot, read a lot about what Brazil was – socially, economically, culturally, politically – back in those times.
"This man is a physical manifestation of these echoes of the dictatorship in the country. So to be honest, it wasn't a big effort to understand the logic of those times."
The pair have known each other for 20 years, having first met at the Cannes Film Festival when Mendonça Filho interviewed Moura in his old job as a film journalist. Although Moura laughs that the director "was a very mean critic" who wrote "very, very heavy reviews", the two became friends, and as soon as the actor saw Mendonça Filho's debut film Neighboring Sounds in 2012 he knew that he wanted to work with him one day.
"I thought it was one of the greatest Brazilian films I had ever seen, and I expressed my desire to work with him," he said. "And it was mutual. He invited me to be in his film Bacarau but I couldn't do it because I was directing my own film back then."
View Green Video on the source website"What really brought us together in this project was politics," he explained. "What it was to be in Brazil under a wannabe dictator, what it was when Brazil took this sharp turn to the right with the President that openly praised the dictatorship, praised the torturers, the killers, and people that worked for the dictatorship.
"So I think that what put us together, actually, to do The Secret Agent, was our shared perplexity over what was going on in the country, during that time.”
“When I was a boy, because I grew up during the dictatorship, the history that I was taught when I was a kid was completely wrong," he explained.
"It's a film about the importance of collective memory, or how an entire generation can be traumatised and how that impacts the soul of the country. So, I think that films are important in that sense. I don't believe that we have to make films for that, but it's good they end up having this function."
Because the information she has at her disposal is incomplete, so is our picture of the character, something which communicates the fact that many records of dissidents at the time are now tragically lost. But although the audience are told a fragmented story, Moura was keen to fill in the gaps of his character's backstory as much as he could for his own benefit as an actor.
"Until, like, an hour-and-a-half into the film, you don't really know what's going on, it's like putting the pieces of the puzzle together and understanding parts of what that character is. And I really like that. I really like that he doesn't provide answers."
One thing that the film does do is provide some interesting context for the film's setting – the northeastern city of Recife. The action regularly diverts from the main plot line to provide all sorts of tangents focusing on the local community and the people Armando comes into contact with, at one point even indulging in a fantasy sequence exploring a local legend known as the hairy leg.
This ties in with Mendonça Filho's previous film – the 2023 documentary Pictures of Ghosts – which explored the various 20th century cinemas of Recife, many of which are no longer operating.
"All these things make the cultural aspects of the Northeast of Brazil, of Recife... I think they are very important part of of what The Secret Agent is. And I love it."
Of course, Brazilian cinema has a deep, rich history – Moura mentions everything from Walter Selles's 1995 action film Foreign Land to Eduardo Coutinho's 1984 documentary Twenty Years Later to Glauber Rocha's revisionist western Black God, White Devil – but this latest uptick, he explained, is not a coincidence.
The Secret Agent is released in UK cinemas on Friday 20th February 2026.
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