‘I hope he goes to prison’: Cannes-winning Brazilian director on Bolsonaro and political amnesia | film

WWhen Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho was writing his latest film in 2021, he felt ashamed of the situation in his homeland as it took a “sharp turn to the right” under then-president Jair Bolsonaro. “Knowledgeable friends…would pat you on the back and say, ‘I feel for you,’” the director recalls.

Four years later, as the film hit big screens, Bolsonaro was out of the picture and Mendonça’s mood had changed. “I’m very proud of what’s happening in Brazil,” he says after recently seeing the far-right populist receive a 27-year prison sentence for orchestrating a failed coup.

The failed coup culminated in the January 8, 2023 attacks in Brasilia when rioters destroyed the capital after leftist candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated Bolsonaro in the election. Mendonça describes Bolsonaro’s conviction as a sign that justice has prevailed.

“And I hope he goes to prison,” he adds, rejecting right-wing calls for Bolsonaro’s sins to be forgiven and forgotten through a pardon. “[We came] So close to… the collapse of society. [There can be] No pardon. “I think the whole thing is very clear,” says the director, citing “very shocking” evidence of Bolsonaro’s guilt.

Remembering is at the heart of Mendonça’s new film, The Secret Agent, a political thriller set in 1977, the 13th year of Brazil’s brutal two-decade military dictatorship, and also the year Bolsonaro graduated from the Agulhas Negras Military Academy, at West Point in South America, before beginning his improbable march to the presidency.

The film, which earned Mendonça the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and has been described as a masterpiece, tells the story of Armando, a good-natured academic who is forced into hiding after clashing with the creepy regime official who orders his murder.

The professor, played by Civil War star Wagner Moura, finds shelter in a safe house for dissenters and social outcasts in Recife, the northeastern city where Mendonça grew up.

Mendonça, 56, set out to make a period thriller rather than a classic dictatorship film about “young guerrilla fighters who rob a bank to finance actions against the dictatorship.”

But when his friends saw the thriller, reactions suggested he had made a film filled with recent history, which was “actually about the last few years he lived in Brazil” under Bolsonaro, who was a paratrooper before becoming a politician and who has publicly longed for a return to military rule.

When Bolsonaro took office in 2019 and began packing his administration with military men and reviving the violent, illiberal rhetoric of the 1964-85 dictatorship, it seemed like “an exercise in the fetishization of a long-lost Brazil” a half-century ago, Mendonça says.

Bolsonaro’s persecution of the arts dates back to the military period when cherished cultural figures fled abroad. Bolsonaro’s closure of the Culture Ministry – which Lula has now reversed – “was one of the biggest attacks I have seen against the country in my life,” Mendonça says.

“This is evidence that he doesn’t understand the country at all – and I felt that, very aggressive,” says the director, who spent part of his teenage years at school in Essex in the early 1980s, and traveled to London to watch films in Leicester Square. “That was something I found terrible – such an act of violence.” (The Secret Agent offers two pieces of advice that express the Anglophile director’s fondness for the United Kingdom: a short introduction from the British consul in Rio, Anjum Noorani, and a reference to the University of Leeds.)

Bolsonaro’s days in power now appear to be over, with the 70-year-old expected to begin serving his sentence next month – the same time the secret agent is generally released in Brazil.

In contrast, Lula appears well placed to win a historic fourth term in the October 2026 elections, with Brazil’s leaderless right in disarray due to Donald Trump’s backfired campaign to derail Bolsonaro’s prosecution through tariffs and sanctions.

“today, I don’t really see the right being effective unless… they come up with some sort of AI character [candidate] “…And maybe it will make sense in a year,” Mendonça jokes.

But the director is wary of the Brazilian tradition of “subjective amnesia,” whereby his country repeatedly fails to scrutinize traumatic moments from its past. Unlike Argentina and Chile, Brazil has largely allowed military officials to escape punishment for the bloodshed they have caused.

“This seems to be the way the Brazilian mentality works,” Mendonça says, recalling the 1979 amnesty law that allowed human rights violators to escape the grip of dictatorship-era crimes.

“Maybe it made sense at the time. But looking back now… I don’t think it was a good idea… It’s almost like default behavior.” [in Brazil] He pardoned: “Serial killer kills 87.” “Oh, he had a mother… and he had two children.” Let’s go easy on him!’

In the final scene of The Secret Agent, a researcher from the present delivers a memory stick to the fugitive academic’s son containing devastating details about his father’s ordeal. “You could see the panic on the son’s face,” Mendonsa says. “You know, [it’s like]”Get this thing out of here because I can’t handle this.” I’ve learned not to deal with this.