‘The Secret Agent’: Read The Screenplay For Kleber Mendonca Filho’s Triple Cannes Winner And Brazil’s Oscar Entry

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the scripts behind the year’s most talked-about movies continues with The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto), Neon‘s thriller from writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho.

The film premiered as in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival, winning the Best Director Award for Filho, the Best Actor Award for Wagner Moura and the FIPRESCI Prize for Best Film. It has also been selected as Brazil’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards. 

Further recognition includes three nominations at the Golden Globes, for Best Motion Picture – Drama and Best Actor Drama, along with a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. It also won the Foreign Language Film prize from the Los Angeles Film Critics and New York Film Critics Circle.

The film follows Marcelo (Moura), a widower and technology researcher. He travels to Recife, Brazil, during Carnival week in 1977 and finds himself a target in the heart of the dictatorship’s political maelstrom, running from a mercenary killer and ghosts of the past. Filho describes Marcelo as a “classic hero type who was not perfect, but a good man, and who did everything right — and that’s why he gets into trouble.” The violence he faces is not a war among spies, but the persecution of an ordinary, good person during an era of repression, corruption and violence.

Marcelo is not politically active or a freedom fighter. His problems stem from his professional success in establishing a technology department in a local regional university in the Northeast, an act that “goes off the country’s script” because power in Brazil has been concentrated in the Southeast. This draws the attention of a bureaucrat who hires mercenaries to go after him. Ultimately, Marcelo’s primary focus, with the help of a mysterious woman named Elza, is to escape Brazil with his young son.

A central theme in the narrative is memory loss and how memory is a “problem in Brazil.” The military regime, which began to lose its power in the late ’70s, enacted an amnesty law that pardoned the military members responsible for assassinations, kidnapping, torture, and rape, creating a trauma in Brazil as a nation and a kind of self-inflicted amnesia.

The film avoids an outright depiction of Marcelo’s murder, which occurs when the men chasing him finally catch up to him. Instead, his killing is revealed secondhand through a raw, gruesome newspaper clipping. Filho chose this approach because “it’s so much more powerful to realize that what we live in the present … will be seen as just characters in the past,” with Marcelo’s intense journey reduced to an image in a newspaper, reflecting the harsh nature of photojournalism at the time. The narrative connects the past and present by flashing forward to show two women listening to a tape recording of a conversation between Marcelo and Elza. This use of the tape acts as a time machine, connecting the past and present, and preventing the historical record from being washed away.

Read the screenplay below.