Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho joins us to discuss his Oscar-nominated film, The Secret Agent, and the history that inspired it. The film is set in the northern Brazilian city of Recife in the 1970s, during the country’s U.S.-backed military dictatorship. ”The Secret Agent is very much about the past, but it’s very much about the past repeating itself through amnesia,” says Mendonça, who draws a comparison between the Cold War-era dictatorship and Brazil’s later years under right-wing Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro.
This is an excerpt of a longer interview with Mendonça you can watch here.
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