1977 Brazil. Not an easy time to stick to one’s principles and remain alive, but certainly fertile territory for brilliant movie-making. In The Secret Agent, director Kleber Mendonça Filho manages to break up the terror with doses of comedy, sometimes humanist, sometimes absurd, often laugh out loud.

Try as I might, I couldn’t get this almost 3 hour epic started at 8:30, as I had promised. Still, I was only about 15 minutes late. This was, however, 15 minutes too many, and we had a couple of dozers-off. I had to intervene with a quick bit of shushing. All good. Another great night at NewScreen.