Kleber Mendonça Filho Teases Next Film Set In 1930s Recife: “A Lot Of Crazy Things Happened Just Before The War Broke”
Kleber Mendonça Filho is in the thick of the awards season trail as he campaigns with his Brazilian Oscar entry The Secret Agent, but he is already thinking about his next film.
The Brazilian director told Deadline on the red carpet at the opening night of Marrakech that it will be a drama set in his home city of Recife in the 1930s.
“The next film, if it turns out to be a good script…should take place in the 1930s in Recife, the city where all my films have taken place,” he said.
He said it was too early to give details but went on to reveal that the storyline will tap into events that took place in the port city in Northeast Brazil on the Atlantic Coast in the lead up to World War Two.
“It always been a big port city, so a lot of crazy things happen in the 30s, just before the war broke… that’s as far as I can go,” he said Mendonça Filho, stopping himself short of revealing more.
The city was mainly aligned with the authoritarian politics of President Getúlio Vargas’s Estado, who came to power in the wake of Brazil’s 1930 revolution, throughout the 1930s, although factions in the city joined a failed communist uprising of 1935.
Brazil was neutral in the early years of World War Two, maintaining relations with both sides, before entering the conflict in August 1942 on the side of the Allies. Recife hosted the U.S. Fourth Fleet, which was created in September 1942 to patrol the South Atlantic.
Mendonça Filho comments came just days after the director revealed the planned 1930s setting for his next film in an interview with Vulture, saying the story would be “embedded” in the world of his 1923 documentary Pictures of Ghosts, exploring Recife’s old movie palaces.
The director is at the Marrakech Film Festival this weekend to where he will talk about his work in an on-stage conversation event on Saturday, and heads next to New York for the Gotham Awards on December 1.
