Last year, I’m Still Here became the first Brazilian film ever to be nominated for the best picture Oscar. This year, The Secret Agent has become the second.
It’s an astounding turn of events with the Academy Awards, given that until I’m Still Here, Brazil had been shut out of the Oscars’ best international film (formerly best foreign-language film) category for decades, going back to 1998’s Central Station (which was, like I’m Still Here, directed by Walter Salles). The Secret Agent is also nominated there, and favored to pull off a second win in a row for Brazil, given that it’s already won the equivalent trophy at the Critics Choice and Golden Globe Awards. Should the film indeed take home the 2026 best international film Oscar, it’d be the first time in nearly 40 years that a country pulled off back to back victories (1987’s Babette’s Feast and 1998’s Pelle the Conqueror, both of Denmark).
Written and directed by critic-turned-filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho (Bacurau), The Secret Agent has taken an almost eerily similar path to Oscars success as I’m Still Here. Like Salles’ movie, it won awards and earned strong reviews out of a European festival premiere, only to play the role of Oscars underdog opposite flashier international contenders (in last year’s case, France’s Emilia Pérez; in this year’s, Norway’s Sentimental Value). The chances for both seemed to improve at the Golden Globes, when their lead actors — I’m Still Here’s Fernanda Torres and The Secret Agent’s Wagner Moura — were nominated. Then, the movies’ surge was cemented when those stars went on to win their respective Globes.
Speaking of Moura — he’s now the third Brazilian ever to be nominated for an acting Oscar, following Torres and her mother, Fernanda Montenegro of Central Station. Moura is in the thick of a star-driven best-actor field, toplined by Marty Supreme’s Timothée Chalamet and One Battle After Another’s Leonardo DiCaprio — and he has the chance to play spoiler if The Secret Agent can keep up its momentum. (The film also showed up in the Oscar nominations for casting.)
The Secret Agent shares a general milieu with I’m Still Here, set in ‘70s Brazil during the thick of the 21-year-long military dictatorship. But crucially, it’s a very different film — fictitious, sprawling and irreverently surreal where I’m Still Here was based on true events and richly naturalistic.
The global recognition of both movies makes a powerful statement on the dynamic and varied cinema emerging from Brazil, which only recently came out of another artistically repressive period. The far-right president Jair Bolsonaro’s reign came to an end in 2022, a shift which both Salles and Mendonça Filho have credited with the very existence of their movies.
“Kleber also suffered consequences for the things that he was saying. You know the drill: They attack universities, artists, the press. It’s not a new tactic. It’s the playbook of fascism,” Moura told The Hollywood Reporter in September. “That was sort of the genesis of this project. Kleber and I, and lots of artists and intellectuals, academics and journalists in Brazil were like: ‘What the fuck are we going to do?’ The Secret Agent came from that political situation.”
