Brazil/France/Netherlands/Germany • d: Kleber Mendonça Filho • R • 160m • Portuguese w/ English subtitles
Marcelo, a middle-aged widower, returns home to reconnect with his young son and father-in-law and investigate unresolved questions about his deceased mother’s past. But something feels off. This is Brazil in the 1970s, and the military dictatorship has been marked by reprisals, paranoia and corruption. Writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s feverishly enthralling melodrama, spiked with energetic bits of ‘70s-style horror and exploitation, is set in his hometown of Recife. The story has nothing to do with Joseph Conrad’s classic 1903 spy novel The Secret Agent, but the film shares, in uncanny fashion, Conrad’s power to evoke history, both personal and political, as a nightmare from which each of us is desperately trying to escape. Mendonça Filho has filled his cast with idiosyncratic and unforgettable characters, and Marcelo, played superbly by Wagner Moura (who played Pablo Escobar in NARCOS), earns the Best Actor recognition he won at Cannes.
About the Telluride Film Festival
The Telluride Film Festival has been, for the last 50 years, a celebration of the art of film: honoring the great masters of the cinema, discovering the rare and unknown, bringing new works by the world’s greatest directors and the latest in American independent film to a small mountain town in Colorado. The New York Times called Telluride “the smallest, most original, and most stimulating of the major festivals,” while Entertainment Tonight simply said it was “the world’s best festival.”
About Telluride By The Sea
The Music Hall and the Telluride Film Festival collaborate on an exclusive presentation of six new features, brought directly from their Colorado debuts. This unique and intimate Portsmouth event treats audience members from across the Northeast to an exclusive peek into the Telluride experience—packing one September weekend in Portsmouth with the latest international cinema, private parties, great music, delicious food, and inspired conversations with other cinephiles of all ages, tastes, and backgrounds.
Schedule
Fri., 9/12 • 7pm • JAY KELLY
Sat., 9/13 • 12:30pm • NOUVELLE VAGUE
Sat., 9/13 • 3pm • LA GRAZIA
Sat., 9/13 • 7pm • BUGONIA
Sun., 9/14 • 12pm • THE SECRET AGENT
Sun., 9/14 • 3:30pm • SENTIMENTAL VALUE
Sun., 9/14 • 7:15pm • A PRIVATE LIFE
