Brazilian Gaze

By Darek Kuźma

 A rising talent with an already impressive body of work, Evgenia Alexandrova AFC infused Kleber Mendonça Filho’s slow-burning thriller The Secret Agent with a visual palette steeped in the joyful melancholy of Brazil.

 The Secret Agent is set – just like last year’s Oscar-winning feature I’m Still Here (dir. Walter Salles, DP Adrian Teijido ABC) – in tumultuous 1970’s Brazil. Yet it is a film unlike anything seen in recent years.

A poignant drama of an honest man-turned-fugitive, because of a corrupt government minister’s obsession with privatising his university research, the story unfolds through contrasting images and visual tensions. The troubling, nail-biting thriller is suspended between the spectral trauma of a military regime and the warm flicker of sodium-vapour lamps lighting up a street carnival.

Yet whilst the protagonist, Marcelo, slowly descends into paranoia – pursued by professional killers and the invisible machinery of state control – the film never slips into solemnity. Instead, it pulses with colour, music, laughter and the chaotic vitality of Brazil’s urban landscape, where joy and fear often share the same sidewalk.

The film had its world premiere in the main competition of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it received widespread acclaim, winning the Best Actor prize for its lead, Wagner Moura, Best Director prize for Mendonça Filho, plus the FIPRESCI prize awarded by film critics.

“I loved the script from the first read”

For Alexandrova, the film’s exuberantly anarchic visual style felt like an obvious choice, whilst the project itself was far more than just an assignment.

“This was my second film in Brazil after Sem Coração / Heartless (2023, dirs. Nara Normande / Tião), which was produced by Kleber and Emilie Lesclaux. After seeing the final cut, Kleber said it captured Brazil in a colourful way but without an exotic gaze. He felt that, as a foreign DP, I brought a new perspective to this film that wasn’t post-colonial or patronising,” she states.

That perspective proved invaluable, as The Secret Agent portrays Brazil not as a romanticised ideal or a landscape of violence, but as something contradictory, constantly shifting and vividly alive.

“The script was 160-pages long, I loved it from the first read. I was born in the Soviet Union, so both the way it was written and the idea of a small person trying to survive within the system really resonated with me.”

Alexandrova may be an outsider by birth, but not in the way she sees and thinks of Brazil.

“I fell in love with this complex place and its wild history. It’s the only Portuguese-speaking country in the region, so there’s this sense of isolation and inward reflection. Some countries look outward, but Brazil often reflects deeply on itself. The historical path of the country created a cultural mix that’s beautiful, but also brought problems like internal racism, class disparity, poverty and violence,” she explains.

“And yet, there’s something desperately lively about Brazilians. There’s a scene where Marcelo learns there are killers after him, he steps into a street carnival, and… he can’t help but dance. That’s how people are there – we might die tomorrow, but today we dance.”

That spirit was key to the film’s tone, especially as the story includes a modern perspective – that of a young woman researching events taking place nearly half a century ago, even as we see them unfold in real time.

Alexandrova’s collaboration with Mendonça Filho was rooted in mutual trust and a shared resistance to popular cinematic conventions.

“Kleber isn’t into Mickey Mousing. He’s the opposite of pairing a dramatic scene with dramatic music and desaturated colours. That’s why the emotions in the film hit so hard. You see these vibrant colours, but underneath unfolds a deeply personal and poignant story,” she recalls.

The aim was not nostalgia, but a film that feels organic to the era while remaining universally resonant.

“We didn’t want to fake shooting on film, but still bring texture, grain and contrast, and not be afraid of highlights. Kleber hates the current trend where people bring down highlights and make everything look academically clean. We really aligned in wanting an image with a wide dynamic range, unafraid of extremes. We didn’t constrain ourselves in terms of colour or framing.”

To capture the emotional and historical richness of the story, she relied on the ARRI Alexa 35, which she operated as A-camera, whilst Marcelo Lordello shot on the Alexa Mini as B-camera.

“I really appreciate the Alexa 35’s dynamic range and how it pairs with the Alexa Mini. I sometimes leaned towards the Alexa Mini, since its more contrasty images and slightly reduced dynamic range gave the footage the character we liked. But having the Alexa 35 as my main camera helped create the organic Brazilian look we were after.”

For lenses, Alexandrova chose Panavision B-series Anamorphics for their distinctive visual quality.

“The B-series lenses are from the same era as the story. Kleber and I liked their wonderful and typical Anamorphic uncontrollability; the fact that they’re full of flares and chromatic aberrations. We wanted an imperfect look for of our ‘Brazilian gaze’, but also because Kleber enjoys exposing the fabrication of the film. He wants the audience to feel the camera’s presence in a handmade, artisanal way.” The camera gear was provided by Panavision France.

If The Secret Agent is a film about Brazil, it is also a love letter to Recife, the state capital of Pernambuco, on the country’s northeastern Atlantic coast, where most of the plot unfolds, where Kleber Mendonça Filho was born, and which became the protagonist of his 2023 documentary Retratos Fantasmas / Pictures Of Ghosts (DP Pedro Sotero). That, along with film’s visual philosophy, was why they shot almost everything on-location.

“It was important for Kleber to show the real city with all of its visual splendour and everyday ordinariness. We filmed all over Recife, often in hidden corners only someone who had lived and breathed there would know,” Alexandrova laughs.

They shot for ten weeks, starting in mid-June 2024. “Even with two cameras, there was so much coverage to get that we were constantly rushing. One time, we blocked the only bridge connecting both parts of the city for half a day. People were furious, but I hope that, after seeing the film, they’ll understand it was worth it.”

In terms of lighting, Alexandrova and gaffer Werick Dino Garcia adopted a practical, stripped-down approach.

“I’m more a negative fill person. For day exteriors, I prefer to block and subtract light rather than add it, which worked well with Kleber’s directing style where the camera moves freely, even in 360-degrees,” she explains.

“I like small lights and flexible set-ups, so our package was modest – Dinos, ARRI SkyPanels, Asteras and HMIs. We often had to be creative, like in interior car scenes shot against night-black cityscapes. You only see what’s inside the car. We placed Astera Titan tubes above the dashboard and in the back row. Sure, you can’t tell where the light is coming from, but it looks convincing enough.”

For wide night exteriors, they avoided LED street lamps and scouted locations lit by sodium-vapour or older fixtures with a soft, warmer glow. The lighting gear was provided by Electrica Cinema E Video in São Paulo.

“As a foreign DP I brought a new perspective to this film”

The most challenging scene to shoot was one that begins inside a cinema and moves into a joyous street carnival, where Marcelo briefly forgets his desperate situation.

“That scene is everything the film is about. It’s chaos, beauty, danger and joy, all at once. The camera follows him as he steps outside, watches the carnival, walks into it, and eventually disappears,” she recalls.

“It was all done as a continuous dolly shot, though in the final cut it was broken into shorter takes. It was difficult to shoot as there were dozens of extras, and everything had to be perfectly timed. We had to choreograph the camera around people who weren’t choreographed themselves. We used every light we had, plus a balloon to simulate moonlight, and added warmer backlights to match the street lamps we’d shot earlier.”

Another challenging scene involved a severed human leg hopping through nighttime Recife and kicking people. As absurd as it sounds, it was inspired by an urban legend and reimagined by Mendonça Filho as a symbol of an oppressive state targeting those ‘who do not belong’.

“In prep, we tested various approaches, including a guy wearing a green suit all over his body except for one leg. In the end, we shot clean plates and sent them to a specialised lab in the Netherlands that created a stop-motion animation using a physical prop – which was later composited into the film. It gave the scene a comic-book feel without losing the metaphor,” Alexandrova emphasises.

“One of my favourite films is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975, dir. Miloš Forman, DP Haskell Wexler ASC), which is a story about individuals fighting the system and feeling small in the face of power. So, this scene meant a lot to me from the moment I read the script. I’m glad it resonates so deeply.”

After the beautiful unpredictability of shooting in Recife, the DI with colourist Dirk Meier at Rotor Film brought a different kind of pressure.

“Dirk really understands how to push contrast and manipulate colour. It was essential because The Secret Agent had to feel rich and vibrant, yet grounded in the real world,” she explains, adding that she had to rethink a LUT used on-set.

“During prep, Kleber showed me a lot of still photos from 1970s. Some had a noticeable red tint, so I created a LUT based on that. It was helpful on set to achieve the retro feel we were aiming for, but in post, warm skin against warm backgrounds felt too flat. So, we pulled back, applied film emulation with slight grain, and worked on halation around highlights. But mostly, we focused on colour-matching.”

“We didn’t constrain ourselves in terms of colour or framing”

What ultimately drew Alexandrova to The Secret Agent was a mix of the professional and the deeply personal.

“I loved how Kleber captured different forms of oppression in a way that felt very real, but at the same time made a film full of colour, humour, absurdity. There’s sorrow in the streets, but there’s also the celebration of togetherness. I think that’s why the film speaks to people,” she reflects.

“As a filmmaker, I love responding to a real people in front of the camera, telling the story through them. And as a human being, it meant a lot to take part in a film that feels like a tribute to the generosity and warmth of Brazilian people.”

That, in essence, is The Secret Agent: a human drama filled with emotional and visual contradictions, a turbulent thriller steeped in joyful melancholy, a cinematic tour-de-force that plays on the nerves and the senses, until you are caught in its rhythm.