SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL - Persecution is complex - IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT (Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2025) + THE SECRET AGENT (Kleber Mendonca Filho, Brazil, 2025)

These two films were among a number of blockbuster successes at the Sydney Film Festival. One measure of such success occurs when the Dress Circle is opened up and filled with a thousand bodies, many of them in the rear seats peering at a screen the size of a postage stamp from seats installed when the nation was a whole lot thinner than it is now. That happened with both.

Some 150 programs, a third of the 448 on offer, sold out  and the SFF management reported it's attendance was up by 11% to more than 150,000 admissions, claimed by CEO Frances Wallace as  "the highest selling edition in its 72-year history. The 150,000 attendees represented a 11% increase on 2024."  Though what to make of the claim previously made in  2019 that that  "event was the most highly attended Sydney Film Festival to date: attendances at screenings, events and talks were up by 10.5% in 2019 to 188,000." Maybe it's a BC (Before Covid)/AC reset.

Both films came to the festival accompanied by their directors, fresh from award-laden appearances at Cannes where Jafar Panahi's film It Was Just An Accident won the Palme d'Or and Kleber Mendonca Filho won the Best Director Award and the FIPRESCI Prize awarded by a Jury presided over by our own CJ Johnson. 

Panahi's film, as with everything he makes, shows no fear. It's story of a victim of official state torture accidentally coming across the man who may or may not have been his torturer is an an astonishing blend of comedy and up to the minute politics via a series of increasingly absurd twists of circumstance. And you get the sense of underlying, seemingly casually displayed, bravery by not only Panahi but also his actors and technicians in making a film which lays out the oppressiveness of the regime and the dangers its citizens still face each day.

Wagner Moura, opening sequence of The Secret Agent

Cant say the same about The Secret Agent which sets itself back in 1977 when Brazil was a fascist police state. The film takes over  two and a half hours chiefly to tell the story of one dissident among a broad canvas of the fearful, the disgruntled and the lumbering police state and its assassins. It may be that there are still lessons and warnings for Brazilians, indeed for all of us in an age of Trump, ICE, El Salvador concentration camps, mass deportations, arrests of political opponents and, even closer to home, whistleblowers being jailed and police forces everywhere being given ever greater resources, one of the few election promises made routinely and one of the few honoured to the letter. 

I digress...The Secret Agent is a safer story and the director is never likely to go to jail for telling it at such length and with such languour, a trope demonstrated from the very start in a slow boil opening sequence involving a VW beetle pulling in for petrol, a dead body lying in the sun and a stray police car whose inhabitants, rather than investigating the body threaten and try to shakedown the VW driver. All that takes over 18 minutes and finally the film gets going...