Films by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Awarded Best Director at Cannes 2025 for "The Secret Agent", Kleber Mendonça Filho grew up religiously attending the cinemas that then dotted the old center of Recife, Brazil’s northernmost metropolis. His body of work displays a deep affection for the codes of popular genre cinema alongside a winning willingness to subvert them, an acute understanding of the complex political and social history of both his hometown and his country, and a capacity to coax extraordinary performances from stars and relative unknowns alike. Alongside his 2023 memoir-documentary "Pictures of Ghosts" and his debut feature, "Neighboring Sounds"—declared “one of the best films made recently in the world” by no less a personage than legendary musician Caetano Veloso—this program spotlights several little-screened shorts from Mendonça Filho’s early days as a backyard filmmaker and critic.
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Neighboring Sounds
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho | 131 mins | 2012
Mendonça Filho’s entrancing debut feature tunes into the anxious frequencies of middle-class residents on a quiet seaside street in sunny Recife, Brazil, where a private security firm has been hired to go on patrol. The community keeps waiting f... -
Pictures of Ghosts
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho | 93 mins | 2023
A film that functions as a kind of memoir/essay film companion piece to "The Secret Agent", with the later film’s loving evocation of the largely disappeared Recife movie palaces remembered from Mendonça Filho’s youth, the diptych "Pictures of Gh... -
Green Vinyl
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho | 17 mins | 2014
A mother’s gift of a box of old records to her young daughter comes with one proviso: never listen to the green one! Adapted from a Russian folktale, this lo-fi stop-motion short—a Cannes Directors’ Fortnight selection—offers an off-kilter blend ... -
Electrodomestica
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho | 23 mins | 2005
Afternoon in a middle-class apartment in Recife: the laundry goes round and round in the machine much as a roast chicken does in the microwave. Appliances augment drudgery and relaxation alike in this humorous domestic symphony, which builds to a... -
Cold Tropics
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho | 25 mins | 2009
A playful but pointed work of faux-reportage about Recife, in Brazil’s northeast, in which climate change produces an absurdist scenario: locals and tourists alike struggle to adapt when chilly weather, rain, and even penguins descend upon Mendon... -
Friday Night Saturday Morning
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho | 16 mins | 2005
Carried across the seas by signals between chunky cell phones, yearning suffuses this sweet and slender, vérité-style story of lovers divided by geography—he in Recife, she in Kyiv.
