The opening shot of “The Secret Agent” features on-screen text introducing the setting — Brazil, 1977 — as “a period of great mischief,” a translation of the original Portuguese word “pirraça.”
Writer and director Kleber Mendonça Filho stressed the cultural context of “pirraça” that is elided in translation at a post-screening discussion at Film at Lincoln Center on Feb. 28.
“‘Pirraça’ is an elusive word because … it’s been retired by most people. It sounds a little old, but it does imply a sense of mischief, but almost in a childish way,” Mendonça Filho said. “I really thought that ‘pirraça’ would perfectly undersell the whole notion of an authoritarian regime.”
Mendonça Filho’s latest is set during the military dictatorship in Brazil, but largely skirts the upper echelons of power. Instead, the movie focuses on everyday people as they go about their lives — commuting, partying and working in their community — while the abuses of local political jockeys soil the margins of each sun-drenched frame.
Everything left unsaid is evoked through Moura’s pitch-perfect emotional composure.
The film’s protagonist is Armando, played by Wagner Moura, a former professor turned political refugee who recently arrived in Recife, the capital city of the state of Pernambuco. There, he covertly shelters among other asylum seekers under the alibi Marcelo.
For the first hour of the film, the details of Armando’s persecution are unknown. He is a widower with a young son named Fernando who lives nearby with his grandparents. Everything left unsaid is evoked through Moura’s pitch-perfect emotional composure. Marcelo, as he is known to his new neighbors, seems world-weary, and yet he carries on with apparent fortitude like the rest of them.
Only during a recorded testimony is it revealed that Armando’s publicly-funded research entangled him with a corrupt industry leader who, in service of the austere government, seeks to destroy him.
This is one way in which Mendonça Filho masterfully controls the film’s tension. He is loath to appease those he jokingly referred to as “client support people,” or audiences who “really want the film to tell them exactly what is going on.”
It doesn’t matter if someone has never acted before. … I love to mix someone like Wagner, someone like my good friend Udo Kier … with someone I had to convince to make the film because he or she is just great Kleber Mendonça Filho, Director
Mendonça Filho’s reticence lends “The Secret Agent” a crucial sense of realism. As the film moves through scenes of daily life in Recife, what emerges is not a clear-cut tale of folk heroism nor a caricature of life under tyranny, but a complex recreation of the relationships that both sustain and threaten us amid great social precarity.
Mendonça Filho and the film’s producer Emilie Lesclaux spoke about the casting for the film led by casting director Gabriel Domingues.
“(Domingues) is always looking in little cities for unknown actors, and it’s a very beautiful process of giving opportunities to these actors that nobody knows,” Lesclaux said.
Standouts in the supporting ensemble include the 79-year-old actress Tânia Maria, who steals scenes as Dona Sebastiana, the keen safehouse matriarch, and the actor Robério Diógenes, who plays the rotten police chief Euclides.
Mendonça Filho emphasized the joy in building a cast of artists with varied levels of experience.
“It doesn’t matter if someone has never acted before. … I love to mix someone like Wagner, someone like my good friend Udo Kier … with someone I had to convince to make the film because he or she is just great,” Mendonça Filho said.
Standouts in the supporting ensemble include the 79-year-old actress Tânia Maria, who steals scenes as Dona Sebastiana, the keen safehouse matriarch, and the actor Robério Diógenes, who plays the rotten police chief Euclides. Diógenes previously studied clown art, which helped bring the character’s vileness to ridiculous heights.
Domingues said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that he searched for talent based on Mendonça Filho’s recollection of his upbringing in Brazil.
“It’s not that (Mendonça Filho) was showing us a picture and saying, ‘They must look like this.’ They were ideas of memories that could change,” Domingues said.
It is no wonder Mendonça Filho chose an anachronistic word to introduce the film — “The Secret Agent” is preoccupied with time and how stories tether us across infinitudes in ways we cannot perceive.
Early filmic influences, such as a young Mendonça Filho’s fixation on Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” heighten the film’s sense of personal nostalgia. Armando’s son Fernando is similarly obsessed, recreating the poster in crayon on the back of notes addressed to his dad. The reception of “Jaws” in Recife devolves into mania when an actual human leg is discovered inside a beached shark’s stomach, which invigorates the local press.
In one scene, a horde of children clamor around a newsstand, itching for the latest update on “The Hairy Leg,” an imagined monstrous entity that terrorizes the people of Recife under the cover of night. Mendonça Filho explained that this is real local lore — a Recife journalist created “The Hairy Leg” as a coded way to report police violence against civilians, thereby subverting state censorship.
The film glimmers with these talismanic references belonging to a lost era. It is no wonder Mendonça Filho chose an anachronistic word to introduce the film — “The Secret Agent” is preoccupied with time and how stories tether us across infinitudes in ways we cannot perceive.
Interlaced with Armando’s timeline is a future in which two graduate students are listening to his voice on a digitized recording, wondering about his fate.
Mendonça Filho mused about what it means to leave an archive in your wake.
“Even this conversation this afternoon here, if it’s being recorded, maybe in the future — let’s say, 2067 — someone will access this (question-and-answer session) and look at it from a different perspective,” he said.
Considered a standout in the ongoing movie awards race, “The Secret Agent” was the most awarded film at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and is in contention for best picture, best actor for Moura, best casting and best international film at the upcoming 98th Academy Awards on March 15.
