Abak Hussain

There is an old joke that the difference between the mafia and the government is that the mafia is organized. Brazil’s military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985, exemplified that bit of truth about government. Violent, repressive, abusive, but also inept, inapt, chaotic, clueless … this duality exemplified the regime, and some aspects of their rule would be downright funny if they weren’t so horrific.

Two recent, brilliant films brings to light the atrocities committed under the regime in that time: this Oscar season’s The Secret Agent, and last season’s I’m Still Here. It may be useful to look at this pair of films, so very different stylistically and thematically in their own ways, together. Brazilian cinema may well be entering a new phase, with enough distance (40ish years) finally between those traumatic years and the present. The countless stories that couldn’t be told before because they were buried or erased can now be brought up, reconstructed, or speculatively rendered. As a Bangladeshi, my special interest in this period of Brazil’s history is very much connected to our own experience of living under authoritarian rule. The anxieties and nightmares are the same: being stopped and interrogated without due process, bribery and rampant corruption in all sectors of government, the utter incompetence of police officers, the unexplained disappearances of enemies of the government and the media’s nonsensical coverage in the aftermath. We are both warm countries with great natural gifts, ruined through human greed for absolute power (Bangladesh much more thoroughly, Brazil at least is still beautiful).

But let’s get back to these films. The first one is the thriller The Secret Agent (2025) directed by Kleber Mendonca Filho. It is up for four of this year’s Oscars: Best picture, best actor, best international feature, and best casting, and the Oscar nomination will certainly boost its viewership worldwide. This is a good example of the type of film that could slip into obscurity without awards attention. It stars Wagner Moura, instantly recognizable to most people as Pablo Escobar from the show Narcos, and even more familiar from the sad Escobar memes. Here though, he has trimmed down significantly and cuts the figure of a dashing leading man. His character Armando is on the run (for some messy reasons which I will not get into) and travels to the town of Recife.

Photo Source: Daniela Subtil

Soon enough, we see bodies drop around him and learn that two assassins in bed with the regime are also hot on his trail. Armando meets up with some good people who offer him solidarity and protection. In Brazil, just like in Bangladesh, these safe houses and resistance organizations exist to protect you from the wrongdoings of the government, and it is their work that in no small part ushered in the subsequent democratic years, and enabled the ground for cinema like this to flourish.

The Secret Agent is not strictly speaking a “true” account, but it was inspired by many realities of the time. Many accounts, of course, were deleted from history. Some stories can only be partially reconstructed from unreliable newspaper clippings of the time, but there does seem to be a general truth to what we are seeing. The omnipresence of the junta looms large, with frequent shots of the dictator’s portrait hanging on walls of government offices. Mendonca’s art department recreates the period with such detail, we feel transported to the bustling streets of the 70s. On top of that, this movie does work simply as a pretty solid thriller. We care about Armando’s fate as he navigates this bizarre world, and though the story can get a bit convoluted at times, it is hard to look away.

Now we shift gears to a much more intimate, wrenching film: last season’s I’m Still Here (2024). The film affected me deeply at the time, and I published a review of it where I wrote: “The unbearable tragedy always looms over our heads, forcing the viewer to ask: how could such a government ever be allowed to come to power in a place as beautiful as this? There is that sense of a paradise lost, and one comes away with the feeling that nature’s bounties are wasted on humankind, because in our greed for absolute power and control, we wreck everything.” The wounds inflicted on our people by the July Uprising were fresh, and we were at the time in the thick of more and more details coming out about our own extrajudicial disappearance problem. I’m Still Here is directed by Walter Salles and tells the story of Rubens Paiva, who one fine day is picked up from his home by the junta. Unlike The Secret Agent, there are no darkly comic moments in the film. It is incredibly stressful to watch the family deal with this challenge, but ultimately, there is a ray of hope that humanity can overcome. This is a film that refuses to be a tragedy and refuses to let the regime win. But step one in this resistance is to document the government’s wrongdoings in as much detail as possible, and try to reconstruct stories that have been erased.

Step two, if you ask brave filmmakers like Salles and Mendonca, I think, would be to pick up a camera, make these films, and spread these stories far and wide to reclaim the contributions of good people who resisted a bad regime. There is no need to lionize anyone, they were simply ordinary people thrust into extraordinary situations. They acted bravely because they had no choice. It is these good people, not the violent buffoons of the state apparatus, who should take back the narrative of those dark times.  

Abak Hussain is Contributing Editor at MW Bangladesh.