Spotlight on the films of Kleber Mendonça Filho
Neighboring Sounds (O som ao redor) (2012)
Aquarius (2016)
Bacurau (2019, Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano
Dornelles)
Pictures of Ghosts (2023)
The Secret Agent (2025)
It is an enriching experience to view a director’s collected
works and understand their cinematic style. In the case of Kleber Mendonça, I
was fortunate to view his first feature film Neighboring Sounds
in a cinema and watch all subsequent films in order. I was a fan of the social
commentary in that first film but there was a lingering sense of dread the film
evoked. I wasn’t able to pin down that sense of dread and what style it was
evoking. Mendonça’s second film Aquarius confirmed what that
underlying layer was. Just to hammer home the point, Kleber Mendonça’s third
film Bacurau spelled things out. Mendonça was a fan of genre
films and layered his works with reworkings of horror, thriller elements. This
sense of genre has a delicious presence in his recent film The Secret
Agent, a film about real and imagined monsters. In The Secret
Agent, the real monsters hide in the shadow but in a very creative
homage to genre films of old, a terror emerges from the shadow to cause havoc
on innocent people. This terror has political implications but in the newspaper columns,
radio programs and people’s imagination, the fear of this terror takes hold displaying the real monsters. The genre homage is played upon by the film’s
Indian release poster:
Once Upon a time in Recife
Recife forms a core unifying thread in Kleber Mendonça’s
cinema as the director’s birth city is featured prominently in 4 of his 5
features to date and multiple short films. The exception is Bacurau
but that film is shot in the state of Pernambuco, a state whose capital is
Recife. Via these 5 features, Recife and the state of Pernambuco showcase
monsters and terrors that haunt both urban and rural settings.
In Neighbouring Sounds, the film shows the
fear that grips residents across the poverty divide when urban anxieties are
heightened by outsiders, perhaps those arriving from rural parts or other urban centers.
Aquarius shows the world of rapid development where the past is
always in danger of being demolished for a shiny new future. In this case, the
villains are land developers who are constantly looking for new avenues to
increase their profit. Bacurau takes the fight for land, water
and survival to extremes where the rich wealthy foreigners hunt the locals for
fun. Interestingly, contemporary events around the world mean Bacurau
feels an allegory of our current times. Pictures of Ghosts is the
only documentary out of these 5 films and showcases a past where cinema played
a vital part in people’s weekly social and cultural outings. The Secret Agent
goes back to Brazil’s political past but this film’s look and feel would not
have been possible without Pictures of Ghosts. Indeed, some
frames of The Secret Agent look like those archived footage shown
in Pictures of Ghosts.
Ranking of these 5 Kleber Mendonça Filho films:
1. Neighboring Sounds (2012)
Aided by a rich sound design & visuals, Kleber Mendonça
Filho’s debut feature film ensures an immersive cinematic experience. A viewer
gets a ringside seat in one of Recife’s neighbourhoods to witness the daily
activities of the residents, including their morning and nightly routines.
Depicting the everyday reality would have been good enough, but Kleber Mendonça
Filho enhances the experience by adding layers of memories and nightmares with
a few smart cuts. As a result, the multi-layered film contains a subtle sense
of dread but in a much subtler note than Michael Haneke's Caché.
This means that even when viewers witness harmless events in and around an
apartment complex, there is a sense that something sinister is going to happen.
The viewer can't be passive and is instead forced to examine each frame and its
accompanying sound to know what the characters are up to.
2. The Secret Agent (2025)
The Secret Agent is easily the most accessible
and cohesive of all Kleber Mendonça’s features to date. The smart decision to incorporate
present times while depicting the past allows one to see the consequences of
events over the course of a few decades. The film also shows how cinemas, once
a vital part of society, become different spaces to heal people.
3. Bacurau (2019, Kleber Mendonça Filho and
Juliano Dornelles)
In the near future, the small, isolated town of Bacurau
becomes a setting for an epic battle for the ages. The inhabitants of the town
are already struggling with lack of water and feel they are forgotten, a fact
confirmed when they discover that their town is erased from the internet. The
arrival of a few strangers jolts them into a heightened state of alert and soon
they find themselves under attack from an international group of killers led by
the experienced killer Micheal (Udo Kier). The killers are expecting easy prey
but they aren’t aware of the town’s history or the residents’ usage of
psychotropic drugs. The locals, led by Domingas (the legendary Sônia Braga),
dig in and prepare for a bloody carnage.
Winner of a Jury Prize at Cannes, Bacurau is a
scrumptious cocktail of an end of the world battle dipped in blood-soaked
Spaghetti Westerns and garnished with political and sci-fi elements. This smart
multi-layered political allegory is dressed in an exciting range of genres with
references to Sergio Leone and John Carpenter’s films.
4. Aquarius (2016)
Even though the film is localized to a Brazilian apartment
building, the events echo our current world of rapid development where the past
is always in danger of being demolished for a shiny new future. In a way, the
core message of this film has taken on more urgency in the decade since this
film was released as fight for land has only intensified.
5. Pictures of Ghosts (2023)
A beautiful ode to Recife and cinemas of the past. The film shows how Recife has changed over the decades and once a city that teemed with cinemas now only has a few such operational cinemas. Many are abandoned or redone into other spaces. This is a scenario that is taking place across countless other cities across the world over the last few decades.
