The Secret Agent

Winner of three major awards at Cannes, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s bravura political thriller set during Brazil’s military dictatorship is a wild widescreen odyssey.

It’s 1977 in Recife, and a man calling himself Marcelo (Wagner Moura, Elite Squad: The Enemy Within) hopes to use the colour and chaos of Carnival – and the craze building up around Steven Spielberg’s Jaws – as a cover to escape military-controlled Brazil with his son. The only problem: regime forces are also using Carnival as a distraction to disappear dozens of left-leaning citizens each day. In an attempt to find freedom, Marcelo must dodge the hitmen on his trail, navigate endless webs of corruption, and journey deep into the daffy dysfunction and death-soaked darkness of a nation driving headlong towards a cliff.

Kleber Mendonça Filho (Bacurau) has delivered some of 21st-century cinema’s most insightful studies of Brazilian society, and The Secret Agent offers a fictional companion piece to his documentary evocation of Recife’s lost cinemas and erased architecture, Pictures of Ghosts. Transcending Cannes’s unspoken one-major-award-per-film rule to snag three major gongs in Competition – Best Director for Mendonça, Best Actor for Moura’s commanding turn and a FIPRESCI Prize – The Secret Agent is a playful, masterfully photographed trip into the past that will be of particular interest to admirers of Walter Salles’s similarly 70s-set Academy Award winner I’m Still Here.

Screening at Luna Leederville from January 22.