Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho has signalled his next move, revealing plans for a 1930s-set drama in his hometown of Recife while promoting Cannes winner The Secret Agent at the Marrakech International Film Festival. On the opening-night red carpet, he said the story unfolds “just before the war broke,” a period when “a lot of crazy things happened.”
His comments come as The Secret Agent, a 1977-set political thriller about a professor caught up in Brazil’s military dictatorship, expands in cinemas and mounts an awards push. The film won directing and acting prizes at Cannes and now represents Brazil in the 2026 Academy Awards race for international feature.
Mendonça Filho has been hinting at the project for months. In a recent interview he said the idea has been in his mind for months and that he expects to start writing after the awards campaign. The story, he explained, grows out of material in his documentary Pictures of Ghosts and will use shifts in time to reframe history.
Pictures of Ghosts, released internationally in 2023, assembles home videos, archival footage and new images of Recife’s movie palaces and streets, tracking how exhibition culture shaped the city across decades. That film, together with features like Neighboring Sounds, Aquarius and Bacurau, has turned Recife into one of contemporary cinema’s most closely examined urban spaces.
Across those works, the director ties local stories to the country’s political memory. He has spoken about “self-inflicted amnesia” around Brazil’s dictatorship years and linked vaccine denial and far-right rhetoric to a wider refusal to confront history, especially in discussions of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency and criminal conviction.
Setting the new drama in 1930s Recife lets him push that inquiry back to the years leading up to the Second World War, a decade marked by rising authoritarianism worldwide. By stressing that “a lot of crazy things happened just before the war broke,” he signals an interest in how ordinary city life registers distant geopolitical shocks.
For now, Mendonça Filho remains on the road with The Secret Agent, holding public conversations in Marrakech and urging distributors to protect theatrical releases from streaming pressure. He has said he will sit down to write the 1930s film once the awards push eases, extending a body of work that keeps circling back to Recife as both setting and subject.
