Neon’s The Secret Agent is set in Brazil during Carnival week of 1977. Widower and technology researcher Marcelo (Wagner Moura) arrives in the city of Recife, where the atmosphere is both vibrant and violent. He ultimately wants to reunite with his young son Fernando and leave the country, but finds himself a political target being hunted by a team of mercenaries.
A mysterious woman named Elza and her compatriots in the country's underground resistance try to aid his effort. At the same time, the film Jaws - and cinema as a whole - is hugely popular, and when a “hairy leg” shows up in the belly of a shark, locals and the media run with the story, exaggerating the possibilities. The film occasionally leaps to present day, where a team of college students are studying Elza’s archival recordings from the period, trying to make sense of its timeline and players just as the Brazilian government seizes the media from their university.
The Secret Agent was directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and shot by cinematographer Evgenia Alexandrova using Arri Alexa 35 as the film’s primary camera, along with Panavision anamorphic lenses. Colorist Dirk Meier helped the imagery achieve its raw energy and lush brilliance.
Eduardo Serrano and Matheus Farias (pictured, L-R) worked together to edit the film. Both had worked with Filho in the past. Serrano cut 2019’s Bacarau and 2016’s Aquarius, while Farias edited the 2023 documentary Pictures of Ghosts, and was working on a film about making The Secret Agent when Filho asked him to come on-board in order to help meet 2025’s festival deadlines.
“Eduardo had already started editing the film about a month before I joined, so when I came in, I began with the scenes that had heavier visual effects, like the hairy-leg scene and the cat,” shares Farias, referring to the house cat, which has two faces, thanks to a genetic mutation. “After that, I moved on to editing the film following its chronology. Basically, we divided the film into blocks of sequences that made sense. And we worked that way until the end of the edit. Once we had the full cut of the film - which is not so different than the running time that the film has now - we started to work (on) each other's sequences, trying to find little pearls that might have been left out.”
“Kleber likes to work in chronologically,” adds Serrano. “We had a very, very short time to edit the film. That's why Matheus came along, because we wanted to go to Cannes and the film was a little bit later than the last films he made. We had around 15 minutes edited already when Matheus came in…It was very natural in the way that we divided the film. Kleber was a little bit in a panic because he was going to work on two sections of the film in different times in the chronology...That's kind of a new thing for him.”
The two editors live nearby each other in Brazil, but worked from their respective spaces - Serrano in an office and Farias from his apartment. In the morning, Filho worked with Farias in his editing room, and in the afternoons, he’d head to Serrano’s office. Both cut the feature using Avid systems with PostLab, allowing them to collaborate with each other and their assistants. Editing spanned a total of 11 months, wrapping up in February of 2025.
“I really wanted everyone to be in the same house,” says Serrano of the editing process. “I had a spare room here and wanted Matheus to come in, but it didn't work out, so we then ended up working online using PostLab solution with Avid. So, yes, it was in the same city. We lived close together, but we still worked online.”
For Serrano, sound holds significant weight in his editorial decisions. He uses AI plug-ins for cleaning up troubled audio and adds reverb to give indoor locations depth and character.
“My most important thing is really mixing in a way that I really feel the perspective of the sound,” says Serrano. “Everything that's around me, everything that's kind of being told out of frame, and also where the character sound is within the frame.”
Over time, he’s come to realize that his editing style is somewhat of a “slow burn,” with tension developing over time.
“And that's the thing about Kleber's films - he's really good in this,” he says of the pairing with the director.
Developing the world in which the story takes place, shares Serrano, can be as important as the narrative itself. In the case of The Secret Agent, the film begins with Marcelo pulling over in his VW Beetle to get gas at a small service station in the Brazilian countryside as he makes his way to Recife. A dead body lies in the dirt nearby, the result of a failed robbery from days earlier. Imagery and pacing give the viewer the feel of 1977 Brazil, including its hot and humid weather, the random dogs prowling the rural areas, and the lack of urgency from local police to investigate the crime.
“World building is really a key aspect of the film,” he shares.
For Serrano, one of the film’s more challenging scenes comes mid-way through the film, where Marcelo and Elza meet in the upstairs of a cinema – a safe space overseen by the theater’s projectionist. There, they discuss the political climate and the dangers they are facing. It’s also the one of the first times the film moves forward to current day, where the viewer sees the university researchers going over these archival audio recordings.
“When they talk in the cinema - this is a very low-key scene, but had like 45 pages (of) script,” Serrano reveals. “I was like, ‘Oh my God! How is this going to work?’”
Flashbacks and later stages from the script helped to break up the long sequence and inform the viewer as to the bigger picture taking place.
Farias, who is from the city, sees the film as a chronicle of a specific moment in Brazilian history.
“A specific moments of a city, of a group of people,” he shares. “Often, the goal wasn't just to move the plot forward. We always try to give time to moments that might seem small, but later become essential to the meaning of the film.”
For him, the “hairy leg” scene stands out because it serves as a standalone short, breaking up the film’s slow burning tension with a bit of levity. The sequence is filmed from the perspective of the unidentified leg that turned up in a shark’s belly and later went missing from the morgue. Locals claim the missing leg has been spotted in public, kicking people. The scene ends by cutting to a newspaper article that’s being read by Marcelo, who notes the hysteria the topic is causing.
“It's really different from the whole film,” says Farias of the sequence. “But (it’s) the next scene that I'm more proud of, when (he’s) reading the news. Marcelo comes, and this meeting becomes a reunion of people. We know more about the stories of these people.”
The Secret Agent is one of 15 films that made the short list in the International Feature Film category for the 98th Academy Awards, and represents Brazil.