The Secret Agent is the latest work from Kleber Mendonça Filho, who is regarded as one of the most important contemporary filmmakers in South America. Set in 1977 during Brazil’s military dictatorship, the film follows Marcelo, who returns to his hometown of Recife in search of records about his missing mother and to reunite with his son, only to find the city entangled in a web of surveillance and forgetting. Taking place across Recife—the director’s hometown and the setting of all his previous works—the events in the film connect spatially and emotionally to Pictures of Ghosts (2023), while the clash between personal truth and political amnesia recalls the conflict between memory and capital depicted in Aquarius (2016). Drawing on Brazil’s painful modern history, the film intricately and movingly weaves together the political and the personal, memory and surveillance, space and identity, within a variety of genres. Both an expansion of Bacurau (2019) and the culmination of the world Filho has built over his career, the film won four awards at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, including Best Director and Best Actor. (JO Ji-hoon)