The Secret Agent

Kleber Mendonça Filho took Best Director at Cannes in 2025 and Wagner Moura took Best Actor, a double for a Brazilian-French-German-Dutch co-production that runs 161 minutes and treats the dictatorship years as a genre landscape rather than a history lesson. It is the most acclaimed film of the director's career, following Aquarius and Bacurau.

Moura plays a man arriving in Recife during the carnival of 1977 under an assumed identity, trying to reach his young son and to stay ahead of the attention he has attracted. Mendonça Filho fills the city with the textures he has been collecting since Neighbouring Sounds — cinema lobbies, apartment blocks, radio, rumour — and lets the paranoia accumulate through ordinary transactions rather than set-pieces. Evgenia Alexandrova shot it; the period is built from Super 8 grain and Brazilian pop.

It arrived with an audience unusual for a subtitled political thriller, more than 660,000 Letterboxd ratings and a 3.8 average, and became Brazil's awards-season standard-bearer. What makes it more than a chase is the framing device: an archive, decades later, trying to work out what happened, which turns the film into an argument about who gets to write down a country's memory.