Brazilian Cinema’s Two-Year Run: From Salles to Mendonça Filho
BRAZIL · CINEMA
Saturday, May 30, 2026 — 03:00 BRT — By Adele Cardin
Key Facts
—The Salles win. Walter Salles’s Ainda Estou Aqui won the Oscar for Best International Film in March 2025, the first Oscar Brazil had ever won in any category.
—The follow-up. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s O Agente Secreto took four 2026 Oscar nominations and ended the cycle with 81 wins on 174 nominations.
—The box office. Combined cinema revenue topped $58m globally and the two films pulled around 7 million Brazilian admissions across their runs.
—What comes next. Walter Salles is in post-production on Sócrates Brasileiro, a four-part Globoplay documentary series scheduled for September 2026.
—Latin American impact. Brazilian cinema is now the most internationally awarded Latin American national output of the decade so far.
Two films, one Brazilian cinema moment. Walter Salles’s Ainda Estou Aqui took the Oscar for Best International Film in March 2025.
One year later, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s O Agente Secreto entered the same ceremony with four nominations including Best Picture. The combined awards haul, box-office performance, and critical reception of the two films amount to the most consequential two years in the history of the national cinema.
The Salles Oscar that opened the Brazilian cinema cycle
Salles’s Ainda Estou Aqui, adapted from the memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2024 and opened in Brazilian cinemas on November 7. The film follows the family of Rubens Paiva, the congressman tortured and killed by the military dictatorship in 1971, told through the perspective of his widow Eunice.
Fernanda Torres carried the film in the lead role. Her Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama in January 2025 was the first time a Brazilian had won that category, and the recognition created the campaign momentum that culminated in the Oscar win on March 2, 2025.
The Oscar was Brazil’s first in any category. The film closed its theatrical run with around $36.4m in global box office on a $9m budget, with around 5 million Brazilian admissions according to ANCINE figures.
The Globoplay co-production model is now the template for the industry.
Mendonça Filho’s O Agente Secreto and the Brazilian cinema follow-up
If Salles delivered the breakthrough, Mendonça Filho’s film extended it. O Agente Secreto, with Wagner Moura in the lead, premiered in the official Cannes competition on May 18, 2025 and received a thirteen-minute standing ovation.
It left the festival as the most awarded title of the year, taking Best Director, Best Actor, the FIPRESCI Prize, and the Prix des Cinémas Art et Essai.
Moura’s Cannes win was the first Best Actor prize ever awarded to a Brazilian. He went on to take the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama in January 2026, also a first.
The Critics Choice Award for Best Foreign Language Film followed, again a first for Brazil in that category.
The film entered the March 2026 Oscars with four nominations: Best Picture, Best International Film, Best Actor for Moura, and the new Best Casting category. It won none, with Norway’s Valor Sentimental taking Best International and the night’s main prizes going to Uma Batalha Após a Outra.
The campaign closed with 81 individual wins from 174 nominations across the cycle.
The economics of the Brazilian cinema breakthrough
Ainda Estou Aqui made about $36.4m worldwide on a $9m budget, a near 4x multiplier rare for any non-English-language drama. O Agente Secreto closed its theatrical run with around $22.5m globally against a roughly $5m budget, also a strong multiple.
Mendonça Filho noted at the Platino Xcaret awards in São Paulo in May that O Agente Secreto drew around 2.5 million admissions in Brazil during its theatrical run, a figure higher than any of the American Best Picture nominees achieved in the country. The result was a structural data point for the domestic-market viability of Brazilian art-house features.
The financing template combines ANCINE‘s Fundo Setorial do Audiovisual, the Banco Regional de Desenvolvimento do Extremo Sul (BRDE), private equity from Globoplay and Sony Pictures, and European co-production money. Both films used variants of this stack.
Why the Brazilian cinema moment is now happening
Both films share a historical subject. Ainda Estou Aqui is set in 1970 around the Paiva family’s detention, and O Agente Secreto is set in 1977 with Moura’s character on the run from the dictatorship’s security apparatus.
The choice is not coincidence. Mendonça Filho has framed the timing as an answer to the rehabilitation of authoritarian impulses inside and outside Brazil.
The institutional reconstruction is also visible. ANCINE was rebuilt after the prior administration’s defunding, and Fundo Setorial do Audiovisual disbursements resumed in 2023 and 2024.
The two films benefited from those flows and from the stability of a Globoplay-VideoFilmes-CinemaScopio production network that survived the freeze.
International distribution is the other structural improvement. Sony Pictures Classics and Neon handled the two films in the United States respectively, and MUBI played a key role for O Agente Secreto in Europe, with a record-setting United Kingdom opening for a non-English-language title.
More: Brazil news in English, every day from The Rio Times.
What follows the Brazilian cinema breakthrough
Salles’s next project, announced in a Globoplay slate, is Sócrates Brasileiro, a four-part documentary series about the Brazilian football and democracy activist scheduled to premiere in September 2026. It is his first new project since the Oscar win and signals a turn toward the documentary format he last visited with Retratos Fantasmas.
Mendonça Filho has not yet announced a follow-up feature. Karim Aïnouz, director of A Vida Invisível, is shooting Here Comes the Flood, an American production with Daisy Edgar-Jones, Denzel Washington, and Robert Pattinson.
New films from Anna Muylaert, Marco Dutra, and Allan Deberton are positioned to compete for Brazil’s 2027 Oscar submission slot.
The two-year Brazilian cinema window is not closing yet. The institutional, financial, and creative infrastructure that produced it is now visible to the international industry, and the next selection committee decision will be the most-watched in the country’s awards history.
How many Oscars did the two films win?
One. Ainda Estou Aqui won Best International Film at the 2025 ceremony, Brazil’s first Oscar in any category.
O Agente Secreto was nominated in four categories in 2026 but did not win any.
Why do both films focus on the military dictatorship?
Both directors have framed the historical subject as a deliberate response to contemporary politics, with Mendonça Filho describing his choice as a reflection on how individuals operate within oppressive systems.
Who funded these films?
A combination of ANCINE’s Fundo Setorial do Audiovisual, Banco Regional de Desenvolvimento do Extremo Sul, Globoplay, Sony Pictures, MUBI, MK Productions and European co-production partners across France, Germany and the Netherlands.
Was Wagner Moura the first Brazilian Best Actor at Cannes?
Yes. Moura’s 2025 win in O Agente Secreto was the first Cannes Best Actor prize ever awarded to a Brazilian.
Mendonça Filho’s Best Director win made him the second Brazilian to take the prize, after Glauber Rocha in 1969.
What does the Brazilian cinema run mean economically?
Combined box office topped $58m globally on combined budgets of about $14m, with Brazilian admissions of around 7 million across the two films. The performance restored a viable theatrical model for Brazilian art-house features.
For more cultural-export coverage, read our piece on Bad Bunny’s ten-night Madrid residency. For the next film-festival anchor, see our coverage of the Rosario Latin American Film Festival opening this week.
The Rio Times — Saturday, May 30, 2026 — 03:00 BRT — By Adele Cardin
This article was drafted with automated assistance and reviewed before publication. How we use AI · Report an error
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