The international success of The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto), which won two Golden Globes and is now a strong contender in the 2026 Oscar race, has reignited in Brazil a familiar — and often misplaced — debate about public funding for culture. With a total budget of R$27mn and structured as a European co-production, the film by Kleber Mendonça Filho did not receive any funding under Brazil’s main federal cultural tax-incentive scheme, the Rouanet Law. It did, however, secure R$7.5mn from the Audiovisual Sector Fund (FSA), managed by Brazil’s audiovisual regulator, the Agência Nacional do Cinema (Ancine). To some, this sounds contradictory. In reality, it is simply the institutional design working as intended.
The confusion stems from a persistent conceptual error. The Rouanet Law does not fund feature-length fiction films. Its scope is limited to short and medium-length works, as well as the preservation and dissemination of audiovisual heritage. Commercial cinema — especially projects with international ambition — has always sat outside that framework. Unsurprisingly, no Brazilian feature film recognised on the global festival circuit has ever passed through it. Claims that major films rely on income-tax renunciation mechanisms find no regulatory support.
The FSA follows a different logic. It is a parafiscal fund, financed primarily by levies on the audiovisual sector itself — box-office receipts, distribution revenues and telecommunications services — rather than by direct income-tax exemptions. The state acts as a structuring investor, reducing risk, extending capital horizons and enabling scale. This is less a cultural gesture than an industrial policy for a sector characterised by high fixed costs and global competition.
That architecture is far from a Brazilian anomaly. In the European Union, public support is explicit and institutionalised. France and Germany treat the audiovisual industry as a permanent policy priority: box-office, television and streaming revenues feed automatic funds; global platforms are required to reinvest part of their local turnover in domestic production; public development banks act as co-financiers. The principle is clear: cinema is a strategic industry and an instrument of international projection, not a sporadic cultural event.
In the United States, the myth of a market-only film industry ignores the system’s backbone. State-level tax credits — often transferable and reaching 30–40 per cent of production costs — play a decisive role in determining where films and series are shot. California, Georgia, New Mexico and New York compete aggressively for productions by offering incentives, infrastructure and regulatory certainty. It is public policy — decentralised, less labelled, but no less decisive.
Seen from this angle, Brazil’s problem is not excessive public funding but institutional fragility. The weakness lies in the stop-start nature of policy. When maintained, these instruments deliver measurable results. The Secret Agent does not stand alone; it forms part of a recent run of international recognition that shows public investment in Brazilian cinema can work — just as it does in economies that treat film as an industry and as soft power, rather than as a tolerated exception.
Where policy continuity exists, an industry follows. Where it does not, cinema becomes a debate rather than a result.
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