For the Second Year in a Row, a Film with Latin American Themes Wins the Critics Choice Awards: 'The Secret Agent'

For the second year in a row, a film with Latin American themes has triumphed at the Critics Choice Awards, confirming a trend that can no longer be considered an exception. O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent), directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, won the award for Best Foreign Language Film, solidifying the place of Latin American cinema and stories within an awards ceremony historically dominated by English-language productions.

Set in Brazil during the darkest years of the military dictatorship, The Secret Agent is a political thriller with a dense atmosphere and constant tension, in which surveillance, fear, and institutional violence permeate every decision made by its characters. Mendonça Filho, one of the region's most respected filmmakers, avoids the obvious narrative and opts for a story that combines suspense, historical memory, and a profoundly human perspective on the consequences of authoritarianism. The result is an unsettling, precise, and formally ambitious film that resonated with both critics and Critics Choice voters.

The recognition doesn't come in isolation. Since its international premiere, O Agente Secreto has been celebrated at European and Latin American festivals, with praise focused on its screenplay, sound design, and its portrayal of repression without resorting to didacticism. The award in Los Angeles further confirms that Brazilian cinema is experiencing one of its strongest periods in decades and that local stories, when well told, resonate globally.

The triumph of 'O Agente Secreto' is also part of a historic streak. In the previous edition of the Critics Choice Awards, the winner in the same category was Emilia Pérez, a film spoken mostly in Spanish that also won the award for Best Original Song for 'El Mal'. Two consecutive years with films of strong Latin American identity is no small feat in an awards ceremony that often anticipates the pulse of the awards season in the United States.

Although the presence of Latin American and Spanish filmmakers at the Critics' Choice Awards is not new, it has been intermittent. Spain achieved some of the first major milestones in this category with Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother , which became a benchmark for Spanish-language cinema recognized by American critics. This achievement was followed by Alejandro Amenábar's The Sea Inside , another key victory that demonstrated Spanish cinema could compete on equal footing in the international circuit. Years later, Broken Embraces once again placed Almodóvar among the winners.

In Latin America, the path was slower. There were notable nominations, such as Argentina, 1985, which garnered significant media attention, but it didn't win the award. Therefore, the two consecutive wins of Emilia Pérez and O Agente Secreto mark a clear turning point and speak to a sustained openness to stories that don't originate in Hollywood.

Beyond the statuettes, the impact is symbolic. That a Brazilian film about a military dictatorship is being celebrated by American critics in a global context marked by debates about democracy, memory, and human rights is no coincidence. O Agente Secreto not only wins an award, it once again brings visibility to a film industry that insists on looking to its past to understand the present. Last year, the Oscar in the same category was won by another Brazilian film, Ainda Estou Aqui.