Final Rating: 2.5/5
What makes a documentary? Is it the act of telling true stories? Because if that is the case, then just about any biopic would be considered a documentary. Does it have to feature interviews with people telling their own or other people’s stories? No, because there are fly on the wall documentaries that don’t offer any additional insight other than what is photographed. What about if actors are used, or no real footage is shown? Many documentaries rely on reenactments and a recent trend of using animation to tell a story have become popular.
In Letícia Simões’ film The Secret Lives of My Three Men, she stretches the boundaries of what is considered a documentary. Simões hired actors to play herself, along with her grandfather, father and godfather to act out her memories and their stories. The film has the actors improvising as their characters and not just reciting lines, blurring the “truth” to be their understanding of the material like in Four Daughters. It also features animation, a tactic seen in films like Flee and Tower.
The film tells the story of three important men in Simões’ life and what their connection to the tumultuous history of Brazil is. There is her grandfather Arnaud (Guga Patriota), her father Fernando (Giordano Castro) and her godfather Sebastião (Murilo Sampaio) with Letícia appearing both as herself and played by Nash Laila.
The film is divided into three parts, each with the character of Letícia interacting with one of the three men and having them tell a story in “their own words”. It starts with Arnaud, who we learn idolized vigilante bandit groups, known as cangaeçiros, in the Northeastern portion of Brazil as a child. They would rob and murder Portuguese colonialists and the most famous of them was a man named Lampião, who took Arnaud under his wing and taught him about how to push back against colonizers.
The second portion is about Letícia’s father, Fernando, who married Arnaud’s daughter. He was a civil servant during the dictatorship years in Brazil (1964-1985), but through Letícia’s investigations, she learned that he was actually an informant of the SNI (Serviço Nacional de Informações), which meant he provided intel to the dictatorship’s intelligence department. She figured this out because while going through his personal files, it appeared that he was employed by five different government agencies when it was illegal to work for more than one. He also would take frequent business trips to Brasília, the capital city, to turn in reports.
The final segment is about Letícia’s godfather, Sebastião, who was both black and a gay man, something that made him very much an outsider in Brazil in the 60’s. Due to Sebastião’s background, it made it easy for him to travel around to other marginalized groups (specifically indigenous communities) to take photographs of, as he documented the effects of the dictatorship on these people. He recounts how in his early 30’s he lost the love of his life when they were found being intimate on a beach by a group of men and only Sebastião managed to get away.
Sebastião gets the biggest moments of reenactments, as Murilo Sampaio reenacts a story about how he processed the death of his lover, in a very dreamlike fashion. Arnaud’s portion includes simple animation overtop photographs to give them vibrancy and add details to real life locations. Fernando’s portion includes the most outside the box documentary portion as Laila and Castro have an improvised conversation about whether he was prepared for fatherhood. Castro answers her questions cryptically which frustrates Laila, causing her to break character and burst into tears at the uncomfortable nature of the conversation.
The film is a difficult one to analyze as it very much feels like this is a project intended for one person to process their complicated feelings about these men, and that is Letícia Simões. Narratively it is difficult to follow, as the characters don’t quite tell straight forward stories and instead speak more poetically about abstract feelings.
From an outsider, who’s knowledge of the Brazilian dictatorship period is mostly confined to the film I’m Still Here and The Edge of Democracy (which covers current Brazilian politics, but fills in the blanks about the past), this film is quite hard to follow. Letícia states she knew her father was an informant because of all his trips to Brasilia in the late 60’s and doesn’t elaborate, leaving viewers without knowledge in the dark about what that even means.
The film also has uneven camera work, specifically in the scenes where the real Simões is showing photographs to the other four actors and allowing them to ask her questions. In what should have been a multi camera setup has awkward zoom in/outs to focus on a different person hoping to catch an important moment. It breaks immersion of the scenes and feels amateurish.
The film works as a personal exploration of one’s own past, pushing forward the art of documentaries, but mostly fails to work as a cohesive narrative letting outsiders into this world. A lot of the film is saved by title cards at the end of the film giving real biographical details about the three men and putting into context what their stories were about.
So is The Secret Lives of My Three Men a documentary when it uses actors to improvise memories, recreate moments that never happened and blur the lines between what is real and what is fake? Well if a film is playing at Hot Docs, it must be considered documentary enough, although in the film’s press kit, it states the genre as fiction. In the end, despite it being a fascinating experiment, the question isn’t one that really matters.
The Secret Lives of My Three Men was seen during the 2025 Hot Docs film festival.
