The Hollywood Reporter Award honors the best fictional work in the competition sections Top TV, Best of Cinema Fiction, and Look. The prize is endowed with €10,000 and this year was awarded to Kleber Mendonça Filho for THE SECRET AGENT.
Former film critic Kleber Mendonça Filho, born in 1968 in Recife, has profoundly shaped Brazilian cinema over the past two decades. His films often emerge from close observations of his hometown, which in his screenplays becomes a laboratory for social tensions. His feature debut NEIGHBORING SOUNDS (2012) already reveals how deeply violence and inequality are embedded in Brazilian everyday life, portrayed through the social dynamics of an apartment block in Recife. In AQUARIUS (2016), he depicts a widowed woman living alone who refuses to sell her beachfront apartment to property developers. BACURAU (2019), created together with Juliano Dornelles, is the only one of Mendonça’s films not set in Recife: here, a village in Brazil’s northeast collectively fights off an attack by racists.
With his latest film THE SECRET AGENT (2025), which received two awards in Cannes, he turns for the first time to the period of Brazil’s military dictatorship. Once again, it becomes clear: Mendonça’s films are not political treatises, but narratives deeply rooted in society that transform Brazil’s contradictions into powerful cinema.
The winners of the Hollywood Reporter Award in recent years are:
2024 Mohammad Rasoulof
2023 Xavier Dolan
2022 Mia Hansen-Løve
2021 Gaspar Noé
2020 Thomas Vinterberg
2019 Abel Ferrara
2018 Pavel Pavlikowski
2017 Sean Bean
2016 Christopher Doyle
2015 Mathieu Amalric
2014 Tom Tykwer
2013 Sibel Kekilli
2012 Karl Baumgartner
2011 Paul Abbott for the series SHAMELESS and EXILE
2010 Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss for the TV series MAD MEN
2009 Max Wiedemann and Quirin Berg
2008 Christian Becker
