AGENTS OF CHANGE

Two highlights from Cannes Film Festival come in the form of a Brazilian thriller and road trip to hell

- STORY: KONG RITHDEE

A wash with saturated colour and steeped in Brazil's history of authoritarianism, Kleber Mendoça Filho's The Secret Agent has emerged as a serious contender for the Palme d'Or.

A former film critic, programmer and now a leading voice in Brazilian cinema, Mendoça Filho's fourth feature — and his third in Cannes Competition — is a political thriller, a tribute to disappeared dissidents, and a deft ode to the way memory is passed through time and technology.

That a good part of the intrigue takes place inside a local cinema, and that Stephen Spielberg's Jaws is a recurring motif, adds extra points for cinephilic dedication. Wagner Moura (best known for playing Pablo Escobar in Narcos) plays Marcello, an engineering scholar and dissident in 1977 who flees persecution back to his hometown of Recife (also the director's native city). He takes refuge in a building shared by several “refugees” — a stinging label for dissidents and others who have fled injustice. Marcello is taken under the wing of a movement that protects political protesters, and his plan is to get a fake passport and leave the country with his young son.