‘The Secret Agent’ at the Oscars? “We are doing everything right”, says Wagner Moura

Brazil returns to the big screen to celebrate and cheer, once again, for a national film. The Secret Agentby Kleber Mendonça Filho, premieres on Thursday (6) across the country.

The film won three awards at this year’s Cannes Film Festival: best director, best actor for Wagner Moura and best film from the International Federation of Critics. There, it also formed a partnership with distributors Neon and Mubi. Not by chance, he was chosen by the Brazilian Cinema Academy to represent Brazil in the dispute for an Oscar nomination for best international film — the list of nominees comes out in January.

“The partnership (with Vitrine Filmes no Brasil, Neon and Mubi) It’s working very well, the film is at the right festivals, it’s being promoted well. Kleber, little animal, doesn’t sleep, he lives the world traveling”, comments Moura. “We have done a lot of good work promoting and publicizing the film.”

“When people ask me about the Oscars, I say: we are doing everything right, but we need to calm down, breathe, because this thermometer now, when we start to get these nominations from other awards, then I start to say that we have a path that seems more real than two weeks ago”, analyzes the actor.

The first signs of a possible Oscar nomination came with Kleber’s victory in the directing category at the Latin edition of the Critics Choice Awards and the nominations for original screenplay and Wagner Moura at the Gotham Awards, for independent cinema. “I’m happy, I really like the film’s script”, jokes the director and screenwriter.

“What I say is that I go where the film goes”, says Kleber Mendonça Filho. “Neon prepared a tour in which we attended very prestigious invitations to the film, at the festivals in New York, Telluride, San Sebastian.”

“What has happened is that this hype thing, validated by international endorsements, has made the Brazilian public look at our film”, adds Alice Carvalho. “The Oscar I’m Still Here paves the way for us, with the beautiful campaign that Fernanda (Torres) he did. But we didn’t imagine that when we recorded it.”

With the national premiere of the film this week, the focus is on the country. “Of course I want it to be seen by a large audience in Brazil, but I have a special desire for it to be discovered by young people, students. That they see a Brazilian film, which tells a Brazilian story, and that perhaps they can discover something new, an interesting point of view about our country”, reveals the filmmaker.

“Our country has some issues with memory, we tend to forget a lot of things, and cinema is a very good tool, because a good film captures attention, entertains, keeps us entertained, but it can also contain a lot of real information about the place where we live”, he adds.

What you talk about The Secret Agent?

Set in 1977, the film follows Marcelo (Wagner Moura), a technology expert who tries to leave behind an enigmatic past and returns to Recife in search of tranquility, but discovers a web of secrets and tensions.

Published in VEJA São Paulo on October 31, 2025, edition no. 2968