Despite society’s historical amnesia, our history informs our current reality. Brazil is a nation still impacted by the trauma of a military dictatorship that reigned from 1964 until 1985 following a CIA-backed coup d’etat. In recent years, Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil’s president from 2019 until 2023) has offered a rose-tinted revisionist history of the military occupation, depicting it as a golden age of Brazil.
Wagner Moura knows firsthand what that means: His directorial debut, 2019’s Marighella, faced government censorship. After Bolsonaro was voted out of office, the former president was arrested for his involvement in an attempt to overturn the election results. In response to the end of Bolsonaro’s reign, we are now seeing an influx of media depicting the bleak reality of the era so beloved by Bolsonaro. First came Walter Salles’ Oscar-winning I’m Still Here, which was a 2024 box office smash in Brazil. Now Moura stars in acclaimed director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, another story of the military-occupation era that is also currently winning at the Brazilian box office.
In 1977, former professor Armando (Moura) arrives in the Brazilian city of Recife — still ruled by the authoritarian military government. With a new identity and hoping to escape persecution from the government, he attempts to work and be with his family, navigating threats from hitmen and corrupt police. Told partially from his perspective and partially from that of modern-day history student Flavia (Laura Lufési), Armando’s past, present and future slowly unravel, and the truths of this man and this era are revealed.
Recife is the heart of this film. It is director KMF’s hometown, and is also among the most deadly fatal-shark-attack locations in the world. (The authoritarian government’s construction of the Port of Suape in the 1970s was a key factor in sharks migrating to the area.) The shark is the perfect metaphor for the lurking dangers Armando faces in Recife. KMF returns frequently to shark imagery in reinforcing Armando’s crushing paranoia — from moments as overt as the opening weekend of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws to something as subtle as a shark-tooth necklace worn by a hitman. Even a reference to a mythical creature of local legend, Perna Cabeluda, makes an appearance via a shark.
While the story of Armando is fictional, it does resemble many stories of those impacted by the regime. Our modern-day perspective, shown from the historical researcher’s vantage, takes the scope of a grand mystery story and shrinks it down — this tale is just a drop in the bucket when it comes to this brutal and violent government’s history.
Due to a 1979 amnesty law that protected Brazil’s authoritarian leaders from prosecution, the nation never got to experience a sense of closure — the people in charge were able to walk away. As a nation with open wounds struggles with the ongoing consequences of its history, KMF and Moura show us the dangers of Bolsonaro’s nostalgia and the plague of historical amnesia.
