Kleber Mendonça Filho, That Man from Recife

Awarded Best Director at Cannes for his The Secret Agent, which also earned a Best Actor prize for leading man Wagner Moura, Mendonça Filho, a native of Recife, Brazil’s northernmost metropolis, grew up religiously attending the cinemas that then dotted the city’s old center, lovingly recalled in his 2023 memoir-documentary Pictures of Ghosts. A backyard filmmaker and critic for many years, in 2012 his first theatrically released fiction feature, Neighboring Sounds, was declared “one of the best films made recently in the world” by no less a personage than legendary musician Caetano Veloso. In the years since, Mendonça Filho has produced a body of work that displays a deep affection for the codes of popular genre cinema alongside a winning willingness to subvert them, an acute understanding of the complex political and social history of his country generally and his hometown specifically, and a capacity to coax extraordinary performances from both legends like Aquarius star Sônia Braga and relative unknowns. Featuring five of Mendonça Filho’s features and a program of little-screened shorts, with the director in-house to present Neighboring Sounds and our Members Only screening of The Secret Agent.