Brazil Is Back at the Oscars — and Its Cinema Has Always Been Political

When O Agente Secreto began appearing on Oscar nomination lists, the headlines framed it as a comeback. Brazilian cinema, the narrative went, was back—back on the global stage, back in Hollywood’s line of sight, back in the room where prestige is distributed.

But that framing gets it wrong. Brazilian cinema never left. What disappeared, repeatedly, was the world’s willingness to listen.

Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, O Agente Secreto is set in the late years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, but it doesn’t rely on familiar images of repression. There are no grand speeches, no heroic martyrs. Instead, the film operates through atmosphere: paranoia, surveillance, the constant sense that walls have ears and history is unfinished business. Its politics are intimate and suffocating, closer to lived memory than textbook narrative.

That may explain why it resonates now. Across continents, democracies are fraying, authoritarian aesthetics are resurfacing, and the idea that the past is “over” feels increasingly naïve. O Agente Secreto doesn’t scream. It whispers. And that whisper travels far.

Yet the film’s Oscar moment makes more sense when seen not as an exception, but as the latest expression of a long, unruly cinematic tradition—one that has consistently refused comfort, unity, and easy export.

A Cinema That Argues With the Nation

Brazilian cinema has rarely tried to present the country as coherent. From its modernist foundations onward, it has treated national identity as a problem to be dismantled rather than a brand to be sold. Long before awards campaigns and international markets, Brazilian filmmakers were already using cinema as a site of collision: between myth and history, elite narratives and popular experience, colonial inheritance and cultural sabotage.

One of the most explosive examples remains Macunaíma, directed by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade. Adapting Mário de Andrade’s modernist novel, the film follows a trickster anti-hero who is born Black, magically turns white, and wanders through Brazil exposing its racial fantasies and moral contradictions. Released under military rule, Macunaíma uses comedy, kitsch, and absurdity as political weapons. Its refusal of realism isn’t escapism—it’s accusation. When power becomes grotesque, satire becomes survival.

This was the logic of Cinema Novo and Tropicalismo: if the nation is fractured, cinema should fracture too.

Violence, Myth, and Moral Collapse

That fracture turns operatic in Antônio das Mortes, by Glauber Rocha, the movement’s most uncompromising voice. Rocha transformed political struggle into myth, ritual, and confrontation. His films don’t explain oppression; they stage it as tragedy.

In Antônio das Mortes, a hired killer who once served landowning elites begins to question his role in a system built on exploitation. The film is violent, symbolic, and deliberately unresolved. Revolution, Rocha suggests, is neither clean nor guaranteed. It is a moral battlefield where certainty dissolves.

If O Agente Secreto depicts the quiet mechanisms of authoritarianism, Antônio das Mortes shows its raw theological drama. Together, they reveal two sides of the same historical wound.

Before the Canon, There Was Isolation

Long before Cinema Novo gave Brazil a recognizable cinematic language, there was Limite, directed by Mário Peixoto. Made in near-total isolation, Limite is a silent, experimental meditation on confinement, memory, and desire. Its drifting bodies and fragmented time feel closer to European avant-garde cinema than to any national tradition.

But that’s precisely the point. Limite proves that Brazilian cinema’s radical impulse did not emerge from institutions or movements alone. It emerged from obsession, solitude, and refusal. The film became a ghostly reference point for later generations—a reminder that innovation often begins outside systems of recognition.

Cannibalism as Method

By the time Brazilwood Man arrived, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade had turned his camera inward. The film is a fragmented, playful portrait of modernist writer Oswald de Andrade, author of the Anthropophagic Manifesto. Split into masculine and feminine embodiments, Oswald appears less as a person than as a strategy.

The message is clear: Brazilian culture survives not by purity, but by digestion. By consuming, distorting, and reassembling external forms until they become something else entirely. Cinema, in this sense, is not representation—it is transformation.

That ethos continues in Miramar, by Júlio Bressane, a loose adaptation of Oswald’s experimental prose. Restless, literary, and defiantly non-commercial, the film treats cinema as a thinking machine rather than a product. It absorbs philosophy, pop culture, and science without hierarchy. Meaning is provisional. Curiosity reigns.

Why This Matters Now

What links these films to O Agente Secreto is not style, era, or ideology. It is posture. A refusal to reassure. A resistance to coherence. A distrust of narratives that promise harmony.

The Oscar attention around O Agente Secreto matters less because of the statue than because it briefly cracks open a global conversation. It invites viewers to recognize that Brazilian cinema has long been engaged in the very debates now dominating international politics: surveillance, historical erasure, racial mythologies, and the fragility of democratic memory.

If Hollywood is finally paying attention, it is not because Brazilian cinema has softened. It is because the world is starting to resemble the conditions these filmmakers have been describing for decades.

To watch O Agente Secreto without revisiting Macunaíma, Antônio das Mortes, or Limite is to see only the surface of a much deeper current. These films are not background reading. They are the grammar.

Brazilian cinema didn’t return to the Oscars.
The Oscars, briefly, caught up.