Last May, The Secret Agent It was one of the biggest events in Cannes, having received two of the festival’s most important awards, awarded to Kleber Mendonça Filho (direction) and Wagner Moura (interpretation). Evoking stories lived during the military dictatorship, Kleber Mendonça Filho proposes a labyrinth of facts and emotions in which political upheavals intersect with inseparable memories of his own family — the result involves us through a dramatic web that takes us to the discussion of what, in these times of television saturation, is or can be a certain historical realism.
With the approval of Nitrato Filmes, a distributor that has been committed to promoting Brazilian cinematographic production, the film arrives this Thursday, November 6th, in theaters across the country, also being part of the tribute to Wagner Moura organized by LEFFEST — the actor will be present at the screening session The Secret Agent scheduled for Friday (9:30 pm), at Cinema Nimas.
The action of The Secret Agent takes place in 1977, that is, the year in which it celebrated its ninth anniversary. Now, even without looking for any kind of approximation or coincidence with the film’s protagonist, does it make sense for you to say that there is some autobiographical component in the film?
I think there are several ways to answer this question. For example, I really like the movie Zodiac [2007]by David Fincher. Of course I don’t think Fincher has anything to do with that killer’s story. What is certain is that, in addition to being a thriller about a serial guyr, there is a strength in it that results from the fact that it is a reconstruction of the city where, as a child, Fincher himself lived — I saw the film for the first time in Cannes, at the Lumière Auditorium, 18 years ago, and the density of the details impressed me immensely. I wanted The Secret Agent it also had this type of density: it is not about any historical fact, it is rather about the very vivid memory of a time.
A time that, therefore, marked him in a special way…
In the first interview I gave for the film’s press dossier, I was very sincere when I said that that time marked me because my mother’s health crisis happened. It doesn’t mean that I have a prodigious memory and remember everything from 1977, 78, 79… I remember it because of that crisis and also because, at the time, my youngest uncle took me to the cinema, with my brother, to take us away from the reality of the house — I kept a very strong impression of those trips to the cinema. Hence he had a sentimental basis for writing the argument for The Secret Agent. The result is a puzzle that comes from stories I heard told by my mother, my uncles and my father… Without forgetting that, since I was a child, I loved reading the newspapers, and not just for the cinema (because I was already a young film buff), also for the literary part, on Sundays, and for the morbid curiosity of seeing the photos on the police page which, in truth, were much more frank than they are today. I remember being very impressed by the photographic coverage of the kidnapping of Aldo Moro in Italy. Today there are a series of protocols on how to show the victim of a murder or a run-over — back then, everything was very frank, like the photo that appears at the end of my film.
How did all this mark the work of historical “reconstitution”?
I am now 56 years old. When we get older, it’s as if we can see history happening in front of us. This ranges from the arrival of new technology, to the use of paper and the fact that we use paper less and less. Or even the political changes in my country: the way in which today we have recovered a certain sense of democracy, when ten years ago we were in a quagmire of authoritarianism… This gives us a historical basis for understanding the world, associated with the experience of my own city — I’m from Recife and I really like Recife.