Sawt Falasteen - Brazil's Recife basks in success of 'The Secret Agent' before Oscars

The movie has already received numerous awards worldwide, and is nominated for four Oscars -- best picture, best international feature film, best actor, and best casting.

Starring magnetic Brazilian actor Wagner Moura, it blends suspense, dark humor, magical realism and pop culture as it follows a university professor stalked by hitmen amid the political tensions of the 1964-1985 military dictatorship.

The movie casts a rare spotlight on Brazil's marginalized northeastern region, giving a nod to its folkloric side but also portraying it as cosmopolitan and intellectual.

It also shows off Recife's little-known Brutalist architecture.

"Historically, audiovisual production has always been concentrated in the southeast, in Rio and Sao Paulo," director Kleber Mendonca Filho, a native of Recife, told AFP.

"It's very interesting that the spotlight and the microphone have been taken elsewhere."

Historian Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Junior said the film dismantles a "stereotypical" image of the northeast often shown on television, as a "caricatured, inferior, backward and traditional" place.

- 'Huge impact' -

Right after seeing "The Secret Agent," tour guide Roderick Jordao was inspired to create a tour of film locations in the city.

The film "put Recife in the spotlight in a way that no government campaign could have achieved," he said while leading a group through several sites.

Already popular after the film won two Golden Globes, tour demand soared after its Oscar nominations were announced about 10 days later, with a "huge demand" from Pernambuco state and other parts of the country, he said.

Tomas Santa Rosa, a 22-year-old actor, traveled from Rio de Janeiro to Recife after seeing the film.

"It's usually the other way around; artists from the northeast have to go to the southeast to work, to consume cultural references. Having that axis reversed is incredibly exciting," he said.

One of the tour stops getting daily visitors is the Ginasio Pernambucano, a 200-year-old school transformed into a civil registry office in the film.

The film had a "huge impact," said principal Antonio Rosa.

- Giant hairy leg? -

The region's pride in the film exploded during the city's Carnival celebrations in February, with giant effigies of Moura and Mendonca paraded in the streets of neighboring city Olinde.

Revellers were also seen with a curiosity from the film: a giant hairy leg.

It is a reference to a well-known local urban legend from Recife about a disembodied hair-covered human leg that wanders the streets at night attacking people.

It is seen as a metaphor for repression and used in the film to evoke a sense of paranoia and absurdity.

"It's incredible that a great film from Pernambuco is vying for an Oscar!" Matheus Vitoriano, a 25-year-old video editor, told AFP during Carnival.

He and others wore the yellow and black shirt that the Pitombeira Carnival group wore in 1978 under the dictatorship, which was donned by Moura in two scenes in the movie and has become a cult item.

A member of the group, Erivelton Martins Torres, said their official store had sold some 30,000 of the shirts, many to the United States and Europe.

U.Shaheen--SF-PST