Foreign Films like “the Secret Agent” Gain Momentum with the Cannes Festival

In recent years, the Cannes Festival has established itself as a launching platform for Oscar films. It was never clearer than in 2024, when Anora, the Palme d’Or winner, triumphed with five Academy Awards. Other films from the selection also appeared in the competition, such as Emilia Pérez, The Substance, The Apprentice, The Seed of the Sacred Fruit. Of the five nominees for the Oscar for international production, only the winner, I’m Still Here, did not come from Cannes.

It’s a bit early to determine which films will have the legs to reach the Oscar 2026 campaign, which takes place even later, on March 15. In other words, we have almost a year of anticipation until then.

The truth is that many of the contenders only premiere in the second half, such as One Battle After Another, by Paul Thomas Anderson, Hamnet, by Chloé Zhao, Frankenstein, by Guillermo del Toro, Jay Kelly, by Noah Baumbach, and After the Hunt, by Luca Guadagnino.

None of the American films in the Cannes 2025 competition came out with the strength of Anora. In fact, none of the English-language productions were awarded. This does not mean that Die My Love, by Lynne Ramsay, The Mastermind, by Kelly Reichardt, or Eddington, by Ari Aster, will be ignored at the Oscars, but none gained momentum at Cannes.

But foreign-language films, like Sentimental Value, by Joachim Trier, It Was Just an Accident, by Jafar Panahi, and The Secret Agent, by Kleber Mendonça Filho, are now in the race.

A Curated Competition

More than choosing good films, artistic director Thierry Frémaux selects works to converse with each other. The competition of the 78th Cannes Festival discussed memory, intergenerational trauma, epidemic, mourning and heredity, resistance to authoritarianism, toxic masculinity, the complexities of motherhood, and cinema as a place of resistance, expression, and wonder.

The Secret Agent, for example, has similarities with films as different as It Was Just an Accident, by Jafar Panahi, Sound of Falling, by Mascha Schilinski, Sentimental Value, by Joachim Trier, and Resurrection, by Bi Gan.

Like It Was Just an Accident, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film deals with the difficulty of maintaining one’s integrity and not being swayed by hatred during periods of authoritarianism. The same discussion appears in Two Prosecutors, by Sergei Loznitsa, where a young and idealistic prosecutor tries to expose the abuses of Stalinism, and Eagles of the Republic, by Tarki Saleh, where Egypt’s biggest star resists when people connected to the current president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi want him to make a pro-regime film.

The proximity to Sound of Falling and Sentimental Value comes from memory and how its erasure generates traumas that span generations, whether in a family, a city, or even an entire country. The walls of the houses in Sound of Falling and Sentimental Value hold these traumas, while in The Secret Agent they are in the streets, ingrained in the soul of Brazil. It is necessary to preserve memory, as also advocated by The History of Sound, where the romance between two men (played by Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor) is accompanied by the recording of popular songs passed down orally from generation to generation. And remember what happened, talk about what happened, transform it into art.

The power of cinema is exalted in The Secret Agent, where Marcelo’s father-in-law, played by Wagner Moura, is the projectionist of a theater – Alexandre is also the name of the projectionist of the São Luiz Theater that Kleber highlights in his documentary Phantom Portraits. Alexandre and the cinema are both memories of the director and participants in the memory of Recife, as well as representing the cinema as a place where suffocated people can express their feelings.

In Sentimental Value, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgaard), the father who distanced himself from his daughters, is a film director trying to deal with past traumas and move towards the future by making a new movie. In Eagles of the Republic, cinema is a weapon of an authoritarian government. Nouvelle Vague, by Richard Linklater, recreates the filming of Breathless, directed by Jean-Luc Godard. And Resurrection, by Bi Gan, traverses the history of a hundred years of cinema as a way to rescue Chinese memory and celebrate art.

The festival also featured contradictory men: aimless but obstinate, weak and narcissistic, toxic in short. Gustav from Sentimental Value comes from another era and neglected the women in his life. JB Mooney, played by Josh O’Connor in The Mastermind, directed by Kelly Reichardt, is an unemployed carpenter who intends to be an art thief, even without skill or commitment. In The Phoenician Scheme, by Wes Anderson, a millionaire (Benicio del Toro) has a grand plan and recruits his daughter (Mia Threapleton), with whom he has little contact and who is now a nun. In Eddington, by Ari Aster, the liberal mayor (Pedro Pascal) is challenged by a pathetic anti-mask sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) during the COVID pandemic.

In contrast to these men, there are the mothers: the teenagers from Jeunes Mères, by the Dardenne brothers, the one with postpartum depression married to a coward in Die My Love, by Lynne Ramsey, the one who sees her daughter taking the same path as her addicted brother in Alpha, by Julia Ducournau. Both Alpha and Romería talk about the societal and familial trauma generated by the HIV-AIDS epidemic. And, of course, about mourning and heredity too, other themes of The Secret Agent.

This year’s selection showed how filmmakers are absorbing the concerns and discussions of reality and transforming them into art.