Left-wing filmmaker and open supporter of Lula, Mendonça (Aquarius, Bacurau) makes a link between the current success of Brazilian cinema and the return to power of left-wing leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in 2023.
“The culture was eradicated in Brazil” under the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro, sentenced last year to 27 years in prison for attempted coup d’état, he denounces. The filmmaker explains that he realized that his work found an echo in the face of “the logic of Brazil” led by Bolsonaro (2019-2022), “from the past“.
In the midst of democracy in the 21st century, a group of politicians decided to reissue the iconography, the words, the ways of doing things and the lack of ethics of the military regime.
“Any story about using power to crush people will always be universal“, continues Kleber Mendonça, referring to the persistence of attacks and abuse of power. “What’s shocking is that we continue to make the same mistakes“. President Lula greeted “an essential film so as not to let the violence of the dictatorship fall into oblivion“.
But the Brazilian director denies wanting to make a political film : “If you make a film or tell a story in an honest, frank and informed way, you will likely contribute to a better understanding of the country or society. My films have contributed to the debate in a certain way, but they were not designed for that“, he emphasizes.
Asked about the reception of his film in the country of Donald Trump, he believes that L’Agent secret a “the ability to get many people in the contemporary United States to identify with its history“. “The reaction was very strong“in the land of the Oscars, notably because of the”historic moment that the United States is going through“, he believes.
