TSPDT

Key Production Countries: Brazil, France
Key Genres: Drama, Crime, Thriller, Epic, Mystery, Science Fiction
Key Collaborators: Emilie Lesclaux (Producer), Pedro Sotero (Cinematographer), Juliano Dornelles (Production Designer/Director), Maeve Jinkings (Leading Actress), Fabricio Tadeu (Cinematographer), Eduardo Serrano (Editor), Matheus Farias (Editor), Tomaz Alves Souza (Composer), Thales Junqueira (Production Designer), Rubens Santos (Character Actor)

"Mendonça Filho came into the feature filmmaking scene as a force, with his feature debut Neighboring Sounds quickly gaining notoriety and being celebrated for its masterful images and thoughtful display of the human spirit. Mendonça’s brilliance did not falter with his second feature, Aquarius, as the subtle yet mature story of a tenant’s relationship with space doubled as a political allegory for broader cultural issues. Mendonça’s profound social commentary carried through in his newest film, The Secret Agent, a political thriller chronicling the final years of the Brazilian military dictatorship. Throughout his varied filmography Mendonça Filho masterfully weaves political drama, dark comedy and surrealist thrills." - American Cinematheque, 2026

"Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho first broke onto the scene with 2012’s Neighboring Sounds, a delicate and original drama about urban malaise. Based in the northeastern city of Recife, Filho often makes films set in his hometown, exploring local issues and the city’s relationship to cinema." - Le Cinéma Club, 2026

"For Kleber Mendonça Filho, filmmaking is an act of both provocation and preservation. Mendonça was born in 1968, in the early years of a ruthless military dictatorship—a time when cinema, like much else, was harshly constrained. His mother, Joselice Jucá, was a historian who studied Brazil’s abolitionist movement, and she taught him that filling gaps in the cultural memory was a way to expose concealed truths. In Mendonça’s work, memory functions as a tool of defiance." - Stephania Taladrid (The New Yorker, 2026)

"Kleber Mendonça Filho likes to expose the inequalities and contradictions of Brazilian society through specific situations — for instance, the building on the verge of demolition in Aquarius (2016), his debut in Cannes Competition, or the village that disappears from the map in Bacurau, winner of the jury prize in 2019." - Elaine Guerini (Screen Daily, 2025)

"Kleber Mendonça Filho is a film director, screenwriter and producer whose work explores the social and political fabric of Brazilian life. Beginning in the 1990s, he experimented with fiction, documentary and music videos before releasing his first feature Neighbouring Sounds (2012), an incisive portrait of middle-class Recife that was named one of the year’s best films by The New York Times. His subsequent features Aquarius (2016) and Pictures of Ghosts (2023) were also included in the paper’s best-of lists… In 2025, his latest film The Secret Agent, set amid the political turmoil of Brazil’s military dictatorship, became the most awarded title of the Cannes Film Festival of the year." - International Film Festival Rotterdam

"I think the strongest part of making a film is casting. I just get to know [people]. They come for a coffee, we have lunch, and we have long conversations about life. I like people both as characters in the film and outside the film. Brazil and the United States are very diverse societies of many different faces. If you're going to make a film about life on the planet, you should be very open to the kinds of faces that you're going to put up on the screen." - Kleber Mendonça Filho (Screen Slate, 2026)

"Cinema, just like poetry, journalism, music, or a conversation between two friends, offers a mirror to life in society. I find it beautiful that films will be truthful in terms of expressing our desires, our fears, and the bizarre difficulties that we face living life in society. I think that’s what I do. That’s not really my mission, but that’s what the films can be at some point." - Kleber Mendonça Filho (Slant Magazine, 2025)