Made during the Covid-19 pandemic, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s unusual documentary traces Recife’s cinematic past and what remains. In digging into its history, the director would write his near future, developing the ideas and motifs that would coalesce into his political thriller The Secret Agent.
Through the eyes of an academic on the run, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s acclaimed, quixotic opus honours the irreplaceable, ordinary lives and stories that a corrupt dictatorship and its enforcers snuff out – and the struggle to hold onto integrity, memory and life itself.
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s delirious genre-bender is a modern classic, escalating from thoughtful social drama to weird, ultraviolent revenge Western.
