Kleber Mendonça Filho wrote in his short film Eisenstein a line akin to “Fiction films are the best documentaries.” The Secret Agent set in Recife in 1977 is fiction informed by a specific reality. The unchecked powers of police, the military regime, and the businesses and citizens who benefited by utilising the ingrained corruption to their own ends. Wagner Moura plays a man who has come to Recife to reunite with his son, but also to “disappear” before he is permanently “disappeared” by nefarious forces.
Nadine Whitney spoke with Wagner about Brazil’s past and present and the timeliness of The Secret Agent in the face of dictatorships and how they emerge and are sustained by wealth.
You’ve spoken about Brazil falling into dictatorships over and again, and of the ex-President Jair Bolsonaro’s jailing for plotting a coup. Do you think that what we're seeing in 1977 of The Secret Agent in Brazil is also widespread capitalist corruption?
Wagner Moura: I think there's a part of the film that when people say it's a military dictatorship; it's not entirely the truth. It's a civil military business. All the big businessmen in Brazil supported the coup d'etat because they thought that the President in charge back then was too left wing for their taste.
And of course, there is a bigger political, geopolitical thing in this case, which is after the Cuban revolution in 1959 the US and the CIA were like this cannot happen here, because they always treated South America, Latin America, as their backyard. So, they backed up all the dictatorships that we had in Chile, in Brazil, in Argentina, in Uruguay. The historical context was the Cold War.
But it’s a recurring pattern. Most businessmen [corporations] don't want to pay taxes, they don't want social programs, they don't want any left leaning sort of policy that would take something from them and give a little bit to the ones who really need.
Still today, Brazil remains one of the most unfair societies. The social inequality in Brazil is one of the biggest. So yes, it's a mix of a historical political moment and the spread and political control of capitalism.
The Secret Agent is a very timely film.
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