In her discussion of two recent films from Brazil, “I’m Still Here” and “The Secret Agent,” Bruna Della Torre detects a partial erasure of the history of the Left and its resistance to the military dictatorship. This erasure relieves the present of the burden of distinguishing between a legitimate armed struggle against an illegitimate state and an illegitimate armed struggle against a legitimate one.
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Within Marxist cultural criticism, few problems are as decisive as the relation between political consciousness and what Fredric Jameson termed the “political unconscious,” that is, the question of whether the two ultimately converge; it is precisely this problem that lies at the heart of contemporary cinema.
The resurgence of fascism moved politics to the center of Hollywood production. A striking number of this year’s Oscar-nominated films engage, whether retrospectively or in relation to the present, with the crisis of democracy, from “Sentimental Value” (Joachim Trier, 2025) to “One Battle After Another” (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025). Brazil, which secured the Academy Award for Best International Feature in 2025 with “I’m Still Here,” directed by Walter Salles, returned to the competition as a contender in the Best Picture category itself, no longer limited to the foreign label. Represented this time by “The Secret Agent” (2025), by Kleber Mendonça Filho, which ultimately did not receive the award, Brazil nonetheless remained at the forefront of a cycle of films widely celebrated as expressions of a renewed political consciousness in Latin America and other Americas.
Political imagination after Bolsonaro
Produced in the aftermath of Jair Messias Bolsonaro’s government, the attempted coup of January 8, 2023, and the unprecedented imprisonment of the former president alongside military figures and their supporters, these works have been received as cultural counterparts to a long-deferred process of working through the past. It is worth noting that international commentary on the event, such as the cover of The Economist dated August 28, 2025, momentarily cast Brazil as a model from which the United States might learn. It featured an image of Bolsonaro dressed as the ‘QAnon Shaman,’ suggesting that what had been done to him might well have been done to their current president, Donald Trump.
The movies seemed to achieve, within the cultural sphere, what the Workers’ Party governments and certain sectors of the judiciary in Brazil appeared to promise: the ability to come to terms with fascism in a way that would secure future democracy. Any decisive reckoning with the so-called ‘Years of Lead’ (the most violent phase of the military dictatorship in Brazil, marked by intense political repression, censorship, torture, and enforced disappearances) had long since been deferred ad kalendas graecas. This was due in no small measure to the limited mandate of the National Truth Commission, active between 2011 and 2014, which was endowed with investigative authority yet deprived of punitive power.
What do these films reveal about Brazil’s current political relationship with its past? This question leads to a more fundamental issue: the political unconsciousness of works that present themselves as politically conscious. This question lies at the heart of any adequate understanding of recent films about military dictatorships in Latin America. Put differently, what is at stake here is: is there anything that underpins the manifest political intentionality of engaged works such as “I’m Still Here” and “The Secret Agent”? To address this issue, I want to highlight one feature that the films share, which has received little critical focus so far: the shift of armed struggle from the core of their narrative structures.
Not in the armed struggle
“I’m Still Here,” directed by Walter Salles, is the true story of Eunice Paiva, portrayed by Fernanda Torres, who was nominated for Best Actress in 2025, and her lifelong search for her husband, the former congressman Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), who was forcibly disappeared, i.e. murdered, by the military regime in 1971. Adapted from the 2015 memoir by their son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the film unfolds primarily between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, articulating the intimate temporality of suffering with the wider historical persistence of state violence.
“The Secret Agent,” by contrast, is set in Recife in 1977 and tells the story of Marcelo (Wagner Moura), an engineer and university professor, who is hunted by hired assassins following a patent dispute with a powerful industrialist. As the story follows his journey and his failed attempt to reconnect with his son, it also depicts the reconstruction of his movements through a metalinguistic device: the events are mediated by archival fragments from the dictatorship, subsequently unearthed and assembled by a young researcher, thereby rendering visible the conditions under which narrative coherence, along with historical intelligibility, is constituted, or better, postponed.
These works presuppose and occlude a fundamental historical dimension: the centrality of armed struggle in Latin America as a response to authoritarian rule since the 1960s. This decisive aspect remains largely displaced from the field of representation, appearing only obliquely, less as an object of inquiry than as a pretext for the unleashing of the violence of Institutional Act No. 5, which marked the intensification of the regime’s repressive apparatus.
While the protagonists of the films are portrayed as sympathetic to the left (Rubens Paiva as a collaborator with the resistance in “I’m Still Here” and Marcelo as a self-declared ‘possible socialist’ in “The Secret Agent”) they remain carefully distanced from direct participation in guerrilla activity, even if the latter depends on clandestine leftist networks to flee. “I’m Still Here,” moreover, includes a scene whose sole function is to insist upon Rubens Paiva’s non-involvement in armed struggle, thereby underscoring the protagonists’ innocence, their moral integrity, their status as exemplary civilians, that is, as subjects of non-armed resistance.
The films thus advance an explicit thesis: in Brazil during the dictatorship, mere righteousness suffices to render one vulnerable to persecution, a claim that, in strictly historical terms, is not without foundation.
Politics of innocent victims
It is, however, precisely this emphatic construction of innocence that generates a troubling tension in both works. In privileging the figure of the innocent victim, the films implicitly conjure its necessary counterpart, the figure of the guilty, whose persecution may thereby come to appear, if not fully justified, then at least narratively less scandalous. At the level of form, this displacement risks reinforcing the same justifying schemes through which violence has historically been justified in Brazil. Which is to say, as a saying in Brazil has it, that ‘a good criminal is a dead criminal.’
If violence is rendered intolerable only when directed against the innocent, what, then, of those who took up arms against an illegitimate state? In a society where punitive imaginaries remain deeply ingrained, and where torture and extrajudicial killing are still widely perceived as legitimate instruments in the fight against crime (that is, mainly against poverty and blackness), the film’s political implicit horizon, its political unconscious, becomes deeply disquieting.
What remains unthematized is precisely the political and moral status of those who engaged in armed resistance: the peasant leagues, the urban guerrillas associated with figures such as Carlos Marighella. Are they to be consigned, retroactively, to a reduced zone of legitimacy, compelled to bear torture and death as the tacitly accepted cost of their militancy?
If this is not an intended position, it is nonetheless the effect produced. By displacing the problem, the films allow reconciliation with the past to take place, but only in abstracting from it, as though historical violence could be acknowledged without confronting the full extent of the conflicts that sustained it.
The aesthetic and historical reconciliation with the past thus appears as extorted rather than achieved. Its cost is the effacement of an entire generation’s memory of struggle. It is scarcely accidental that these accounts emerge at a conjuncture in which liberal sectors of Brazil’s society vocally condemn the deployment of violence by the far right. What is at stake in these films is a partial erasure of the history of the Left, one that relieves the present of the burden of distinguishing between a legitimate armed struggle against an illegitimate state and an illegitimate armed struggle against a legitimate one. In this sense, armed struggle in Brazil, long since defeated in military confrontation, undergoes a second defeat.
A second defeat
The films’ explicit political consciousness is accompanied by a political unconscious structured around a diagnosis of excessive state violence. That is, the state was extremely violent towards those who were just moral people going about their business. The dictatorship appears less as a system to be negated in its entirety than as a regime whose fundamental error lay in the indiscriminate nature of its targets. In this displacement, the problem is subtly reconfigured: not the existence of the dictatorship as such, but the misdirection of its violence.
At the same time, the films efface the grassroots uprisings that the military coup sought to suppress and, particularly in “I’m Still Here,” privilege the role of elite actors in the opposition to the regime, without any sustained engagement with the class alliances that underpinned the political movements of the 1960s. In this respect, the films also register a wider historical symptom. They reflect a Left that, increasingly compelled to defend institutional order in the face of far-right political racketeering, remains indebted to the unresolved task of working through its own past – a past whose contradictions continue to exert pressure exactly where they are most forcefully disavowed.