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Sponsored by the Instituto Guimarães, Canal Alliance, The Consulate General of Brazil in San Francisco, and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Marin, the Mill Valley Film Festival (“MVFF”) continues its initiative to celebrate the richness of cinema in Spanish and Portuguese from around the world. In their 48th edition, MVFF’s !Viva El Cine! sidebar includes 14 feature films and 8 shorts curated to deeply resonate with these communities, showcasing the best international and independent works. MVFF believes that—through cinema—we build a space where history, culture, and identity come alive, creatively and bravely countering current attempts to undermine DEI perspectives. Here are four such representations.
The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto, 2025)—Cribbing from João Federici’s program capsule: “Few directors tell stories with as much atmosphere, precision, and purpose as Kleber Mendonça Filho. In Recife in 1977, Marcelo—played with quiet magnetism by Wagner Moura—returns to the city in the middle of the chaos of Carnaval to reunite with his son and plot a dangerous escape under the watchful eyes of Brazil’s repressive military regime. Mendonça Filho’s deep love for cinema pulses through every frame of this film that blends political drama, slow-burn suspense, deadpan humor, and surreal flourishes into something uniquely his own. The visual texture is rich and evocative, and the film’s quiet tension lingers long after it ends. Honored at Cannes with Best Director, Best Actor, FIPRESCI, and the AFCAE Award, it confirms Mendonça Filho as one of the most daring and original voices in world cinema today. The Secret Agent is unforgettable, a film we’ll be talking about for a long time to come.”
Brazil’s official submission to the Academy Awards®, The Secret Agent is equal parts family drama, political thriller and, yes, even a tip of the hat (tip of the toe?) to the horror genre. It spoke to me above and beyond its skillful merits, providing relevance to our current moment in the United States. It needs to be remembered that Brazil’s military regime came to power through a U.S.-backed coup in 1964 and governed with repressive tactics for 21 years. This stresses a troublesome accent on Trump’s “friendship” with former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro who was sentenced to 27 years and 3 months in prison on September 11, 2025, for plotting a coup to stay in power after his 2022 election loss. The U.S., through Trump, once again has attempted to influence the democratic process in Brazil by denouncing Bolsonaro’s incarceration, placing sanctions on a Brazilian Supreme Justice and levying a 50% tariff on Brazilian exports.
In a recent dispatch by MSNBC correspondent Ali Velshi, he laid out the contrast between Brazil enforcing its democracy by effecting the incarceration of Bolsonaro, whereas here in the U.S. efforts to hold Trump accountable for his autocratic ambitions have failed. Why? Velshi suggests that—because the United States has not suffered a dictatorship—it has no reference to measure what we are losing if our democracy collapses. Brazil, by contrast, remembers its dictatorship all too painfully and wants nothing to do with it again. Will the U.S. need to go through a dictatorship under the Trump administration in order to focus on what it has lost? I’m not alone in these concerns. Wagner Moura has been quoted as bluntly stating, “Brazilians know what dictatorship is. Americans don’t. That’s why we were efficient in defending democracy when our institutions were attacked. Here in the U.S., people sometimes take democracy for granted. That scares me.”
The narrative bracket to The Secret Agent is how the events of 1977 are being researched by a present-day history student. The remove from the atrocities of 1977 to the subsequent reaction in 2025 speaks to the failures of memory and the anesthetizations of history. What will Americans choose to remember and research 50 years from now?
The West Coast premiere of Sirāt (Spain’s official entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the Oscars®) hypnotically captures the existential reality of every refugee suffering in transit in the world today, regardless of national origin or political necessity, most notably in its final sequence where the survivors of the film’s harrowing and continually unexpected sojourn find themselves thrown together with fellow refugees crammed onto the top of a coursing train. Sergi López (who I remember as the cruel fascist captain in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth) is here broken down to a father desperate to find his daughter only to experience one of the most torturous moments of grief committed to the screen.
Variety’s Jamie Lang conducted a revealing interview with director Laxe when the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Laxe admitted to the film’s multi-layered mythic beat expressed through a sonorous ambient score, stressing the need young audiences have for “stories that speak to transcendence.”
Several years ago in conversation with Spanish filmmaker Agustí Villaronga, he reintroduced me to the Iberian concept that evil is contagious and enters through the eye. We were speaking about how horrific events witnessed by children introduce them to the practice of human evil, thereby defeating their innocence. I can’t help but think of this each and every time I see a news report on how the current Trump administration is traumatizing immigrant children in their cruel ICE raids.
The idea that evil enters through the eye is ancient and appears in various texts, notably as Jesus' teaching in Matthew 6:22-23 where he states, "The eye is the lamp of the body ... if your eyes are evil, your whole body will be full of darkness". This concept also has roots in ancient Sumerian texts, such as the Instructions of Šuruppag, which warns, "Do not do evil with your eye". Additionally, various cultures, including Hinduism, Islam, and Jewish traditions, have beliefs and texts discussing the "evil eye".
In his debut feature, a thinly-veiled AIDS allegory, boasting its U.S. premiere at MVFF (and Chile’s submission for the Best International Feature Film category at the Academy Awards®), Diego Céspedes inflects this ancient theme in a startling, provocative way. If images are indeed indelible, such that one cannot remove them from the mind once they have been seen, Céspedes reins magical realism to communicate the transfer of presumed evil from one individual to another. It is incandescent, erotic and political all at once: a master stroke from a promising new visionary.
In its West Coast premiere, Yanuni serves not only as an ecological treatise, and a plea for the human rights of indigenous people, but also as a thrilling action-packed documentary that rivals narrative features for its knuckle-biting drama and it’s rather sexy relationship between political activists Juma Xipaia and Hugo Loss, each on their own turf. It lands firmly in the “truth is stranger than fiction” category, and culminates in Ladkani’s proud filmic capture of the initiation of Juma and Hugo’s baby in an early morning ritual, during sunrise, when her tiny feet first touch the warm waters of the Iriri river, deep inside the indigenous territory of the Xipaia. The infant’s name, given as well to the documentary, is Yanuni and presages that a new leader has been born. It’s a name, Ladkani has written, that means “victory.”
