“The Secret Agent is a film about memory, or the lack of memory. And generational trauma,” said star Wanger Moura, accepting the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture on Sunday night. But “I think that if trauma can be passed along generations, values can too,” he said. The film by Brazil’s Kleber Mendonça Filho is about “sticking with your values in difficult moments.”
“This is a very important moment in time, in history, to be making films,” said Filho, accepting the award when the Brazilian film won the category of Best Motion Picture – Non English Language.
The Secret Agent, set in 1977 Brazil, is about living under a military dictatorship, which held sway in Brazil from 1964-1985.
Moura plays Marcelo, a technology expert in his early 40s on the run from a corrupt system and hoping to reunite with his son. He travels to Recife during Carnival but soon realizes that the city is not the safe haven he was expecting.
References to complicated times were only fleetingly touched on tonight if at all save for presenter Judd Apatow, who told the audience, “I believe we are in a dictatorship now.”
Moura was nominated for a Golden Globe in 2016 for Narcos.
Speaking last week at the New York Film Critics Circle (where he won Best Actor), he said politics united him and director and friend Filho, specifically, strongman Jair Bolsonaro, who led Brazil from 2018-2022. Bolsanaro recently started a 27-year prison sentence after he was convicted by the nation’s highest court of attempting a coup in the last election. Moura offered a shoutout to “Brazilian democracy and Brazilian institutions.”
Neon acquired The Secret Agent at Cannes where Filho won Best Director, Moura Best Actor, and it took the FIPRESCI Prize.
