Resumen

The history of Brazil is precariously and directly connected to the formation of the Western world. On one hand due to their forced insertion into the slave-owning colonial model through the economy and politics of the period. On the other hand it has been interpreted ideologically throughout the centuries as a territory of an inferior people – both biologically and culturally – in global society, first by the Europeans during colonialism and later by the Americans in developmentalism, through their interventionist actions in Brazil and in other dictatorships that occurred in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s. During those dark times, cultural forms of internal and external control over the country’s structures were consolidated and above all in the images collective memories which were built in consciousness that justified hierarchical logics of social subordination up to nowadays. 
The period of the civil-military-business dictatorship (1964-1985), despite great artistic-cultural resistance, including the movies, social violence and the gap between Brazilian social classes were normalized, even with some governments in the democratic period that developed public policies wishing to change this scenario. Several practices from that difficult period have remained in peoples’s collective memory, reinterpreted in recent times with a fascist profile. Thus, we can speak of “memories” that on various levels they clash and translate themselves into demands requiring clarification about what happened in Brazil with erased or hidden events. In a historical, political, and allegorical way, this is what the film “The Secret Agent” (2025), by Kleber Mendonça Filho, addresses and which this work seeks to discuss.

Keywords: Brazilian cinema; Collective memory; History of Brazil; Civil-military-business dictatorship; Symbolic struggles.