This week’s Podcast features an in-depth interview with Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, whose latest feature, The Secret Agent, is in select theaters now. The film was a highlight of both this year’s Cannes, where Mendonça won the Best Director prize, and this fall’s New York Film Festival. The Secret Agent is set, like many of the director’s films, in his Northeastern Brazilian hometown of Recife, in 1977—“a time of mischief,” as a title card tells us early on. Wagner Moura (Cannes Best Actor winner) plays Marcelo, a man on the run from powerful forces connected to the ruling military dictatorship, seeking refuge and possible safe passage out of the country with a ragtag group of dissidents and political exiles. The Secret Agent is an endlessly inventive, lively, and frightening excavation of the specifics of past and place. And like the filmmaker’s recent work, including the scathing genre hybrid Bacurau (2019, co-directed by Juliano Dornelles) and the autobiographical documentary Pictures of Ghosts (2023), it’s in thrall to the history and possibilities of cinema.
Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute spoke to Mendonça about the film, his tendencies to set his stories in familiar locales, his fascination with recording technology and voices out of the past, and how he managed to blend fantasy and humor into this chilling political thriller.
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This week’s Podcast features an in-depth interview with Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, whose latest feature, The Secret Agent, is in select theaters now. The film was a highlight of both this year’s Cannes, where Mendonça won the Best Director prize, and this fall’s New York Film Festival. The Secret Agent is set, like many of the director’s films, in his Northeastern Brazilian hometown of Recife, in 1977—“a time of mischief,” as a title card tells us early on. Wagner Moura (Cannes Best Actor winner) plays Marcelo, a man on the run from powerful forces connected to the ruling military dictatorship, seeking refuge and possible safe passage out of the country with a ragtag group of dissidents and political exiles. The Secret Agent is an endlessly inventive, lively, and frightening excavation of the specifics of past and place. And like the filmmaker’s recent work, including the scathing genre hybrid Bacurau (2019, co-directed by Juliano Dornelles) and the autobiographical documentary Pictures of Ghosts (2023), it’s in thrall to the history and possibilities of cinema.
Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute spoke to Mendonça about the film, his tendencies to set his stories in familiar locales, his fascination with recording technology and voices out of the past, and how he managed to blend fantasy and humor into this chilling political thriller.
Cinema of the Rice Cooker, with Phoebe Chen, Bedatri Datta Choudhury, and Joseph Hernandez
The Film Comment Podcast
42 minutes 52 seconds
4 months ago
Cinema of the Rice Cooker, with Phoebe Chen, Bedatri Datta Choudhury, and Joseph Hernandez
From July 4 to July 8, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish presented a series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music called Let Them Cook: Cinema of the Rice Cooker, which spotlit movies where the humble household appliance takes on a poetics and pragmatism uniquely suited to the screen. Some of the films in the series included Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (2024), Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum (2008), Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), Raymond Yip's Sixty Million Dollar Man (2005), Yasujiro Ozu's Good Morning (1959), and Bong Joon Ho's Incoherence (1994).
After a screening of Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill (1967)—which follows a yakuza assassin with a fetish for the smell of cooking rice—Devika recorded a panel discussion with film scholar and critic Phoebe Chen, The Philadelphia Inquirer's Bedatri Datta Choudhury, and Bon Appétit's Joseph Hernandez about the cinematic appeal of the rice cooker.
The Film Comment Podcast
This week’s Podcast features an in-depth interview with Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, whose latest feature, The Secret Agent, is in select theaters now. The film was a highlight of both this year’s Cannes, where Mendonça won the Best Director prize, and this fall’s New York Film Festival. The Secret Agent is set, like many of the director’s films, in his Northeastern Brazilian hometown of Recife, in 1977—“a time of mischief,” as a title card tells us early on. Wagner Moura (Cannes Best Actor winner) plays Marcelo, a man on the run from powerful forces connected to the ruling military dictatorship, seeking refuge and possible safe passage out of the country with a ragtag group of dissidents and political exiles. The Secret Agent is an endlessly inventive, lively, and frightening excavation of the specifics of past and place. And like the filmmaker’s recent work, including the scathing genre hybrid Bacurau (2019, co-directed by Juliano Dornelles) and the autobiographical documentary Pictures of Ghosts (2023), it’s in thrall to the history and possibilities of cinema.
Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute spoke to Mendonça about the film, his tendencies to set his stories in familiar locales, his fascination with recording technology and voices out of the past, and how he managed to blend fantasy and humor into this chilling political thriller.
