"The Secret Agent": Kleber Mendonça Filho on His Oscar-Nominated Film & Brazil's Military Dictatorship

Brazilian director Kleber Mendonca Filho joins us to discuss his Oscar-nominated film, The Secret Agent, and the history that inspired it. The film is set in the northern Brazilian city of Recife in the 1970s, during the country's U.S.-backed military dictatorship. "The Secret Agent is very much about the past, but it's very much about the past repeating itself through amnesia," says Mendonca, who draws a comparison between the Cold War-era dictatorship and Brazil's later years under right-wing Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro.

This is an excerpt of a longer interview with Mendonca you can watch here.