
The Secret Agent Network
January 7–13, 2026
On the occasion of The Secret Agent’s theatrical release at Film at Lincoln Center, Kleber Mendonça Filho programs a selection of works that informed his ambitious new film.
Eduardo Coutinho
1984|
Brazil|
119 minutes|
Portuguese with English subtitles
Eduardo Coutinho reconstructs a 1964 film halted by Brazil’s coup, fusing original footage and new interviews to trace the murder of labor leader João Pedro Teixeira and the enduring impact on those he left behind.
Eric Red
1991|
U.S.|
88 minutes
A criminal psychologist (Jeff Fahey) is fitted with a transplanted arm, only to discover it belonged to an executed serial killer whose impulses may still be alive under his skin, in Eric Red’s gruesomely funny thriller.
Steven Spielberg
1977|
U.S.|
137 minutes
A rare opportunity to see one of the great works of American science fiction presented in its newly restored, Spielberg-approved version on 70mm.
Karel Kachyňa
1970|
Czechoslovakia|
94 minutes|
Czech with English subtitles
Banned for decades for its unvarnished depiction of state surveillance, The Ear unfolds over one sleepless night when a couple discovers that “the ear” of the Communist regime is listening in on their every word.
Jorge Bodanzky, Orlando Senna
1974|
Brazil|
99 minutes|
Portuguese with English subtitles
Shot along the freshly carved Trans-Amazonian Highway in the early years of Brazil’s dictatorship, Iracema captured a country violently remaking itself through state-backed “development” and the accelerating destruction of the Amazon.
1970|
Italy|
115 minutes|
Italian with English subtitles
Elio Petri’s Oscar-winning satire remains one of the most caustic and crazed portraits of institutional power ever produced, starring Gian Maria Volonté as a police inspector who murders his mistress.
Héctor Babenco
1977|
Brazil|
121 minutes|
Portuguese with English subtitles
Héctor Babenco’s mean, street-level thriller follows a notorious bank robber whose fugitive fame collides with the clandestine violence of Brazil’s police death squad during the military dictatorship.
John Boorman
1967|
U.S. / U.K|
92 minutes
Left for dead after a heist gone wrong, Lee Marvin’s aptly named Walker crosses Los Angeles with an eerie resolve to find the money and men who betrayed him.
About the Series
With his sweeping and shape-shifting The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho confirms himself as one of today’s most vital and visionary filmmakers. As the film continues its acclaimed run at Film at Lincoln Center, the director turns to some of the works that have long shaped his imagination for this special series. Drawn from far-flung corners of cinema yet united, in their own ways, by their examinations of how power operates—how authority can conceal itself, distorts perception, and manipulates the conditions of everyday life—his selections move from modernist noir to prismatically reflexive documentaries to blockbuster spectacle and the over-the-top B movie. Each forms a new vantage onto the cinematic network that underlies Mendonça Filho’s sensibility and, taken together, offers audiences a deeper way of seeing the ideas, images, and tensions running through The Secret Agent.
The series gathers together newly restored works—including Brazilian landmarks such as Iracema and Lúcio Flávio as well as Karel Kachyňa’s long-banned The Ear—alongside large-format presentations of Close Encounters of the Third Kind on 70mm, Eric Red’s phantom-limb-horror Body Parts on 35mm, and a new remaster of the gloriously unruly killer-whale film, Orca. It also features a rare New York screening of Eduardo Coutinho’s Man Marked for Death, 20 Years Later, long regarded as one of Brazil’s greatest documentaries.
Organized by Kleber Mendonça Filho, Florence Almozini, and Tyler Wilson.
Acknowledgments:
NEON; Gullane+ and Montanha Russa Cinematográfica; Myra Babenco, HB Filme

I hope this unusual set list gives you an idea of what goes on as you develop a new film out of very personal feelings about films from the past.”
—Kleber Mendonça Filho

























