Synopsis
Pictures of Ghosts is a multidimensional journey through time, sound, architecture and filmmaking, set in the urban landscape of Recife, Brazilian coastal capital of Pernambuco: a historical and human territory, examined through the great movie theaters that served as spaces of conviviality during the 20th century. Having hosted dreams and progress, these places have also embodied a major transformation on social practices. Combining archive documentary, mystery, film clips and personal memories, Pictures of Ghosts is a map of a city through the lens of cinema.
Where to watch Pictures of Ghosts
In a scene from Pictures of Ghosts, director Kleber Mendonça Filho (Bacurau, 2019) shows an affectionate map from Recife, underlined by the city’s outdoor cinemas. Made up of archive footage (many of them from the director’s personal archive), the film itself is an affectionate map of Kleber’s past and the areas where his story intersects with the house and the city that surrounds him.
The director himself is reluctant to classify the film as a documentary, and inserts elements of fantasy into the narrative of the work, creating a documentary full of artistic permissions. A “fantasy documentary”, as he himself said in an interview about the film (or, “fiction movies are the best documentaries”, as one of the scenes puts it).
Pictures of Ghosts took a long time to be made, a movie that didn’t have a script and found its meaning throughout its development. Very personal, it leaves you uncertain about all the layers that make it up, as “the best films usually do”, as the director revealed in another interview.
This is a feature that doesn’t hide its unconditional love for cinema and its ability to document time. If this is not clear from the narrated scenes during its runtime, it is even more evident in the film’s final scene, where he embraces the fantasy dosed in metaphors in the previous minutes.
Curiously, the director says in the film’s press release that at a certain point he felt stuck in its development. It was while thinking about the script for his next project (O Agente Secreto, with Wagner Moura) that he made connections that led to the continuation of Pictures of Ghosts. This return to previously created content, in order to find its place in the present, is exactly what he did with footage gathered over the years in various formats, something that was slowly polished into a story so personal that it ends up reverberating with the past of a city and the present of a country.
Why we recommend it
A “fantasy documentary”, as director Kleber Mendonça Filho has commented, Pictures of Ghosts is such a personal declaration of love for cinema, Recife and the history of its street movie theaters, that it becomes universal and contemporary.
Credits
- Original title: Retratos Fantasmas
- Rating: 12
- Runtime: 1h 33 min
- Release year: 2023
- Country: Brazil
- Production company: CinemaScópio
- Distributor: Vitrine Filmes
- Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho
- Production: Emilie Lesclaux / Silvia Cruz (coprodução), Felipe Lopes (coprodução)
- Writer: Kleber Mendonça Filho
- Cast: Kleber Mendonça Filho, Rubéns Santos
- Cinematography: Pedro Sotero, abs
- Additional cinematography: Kleber Mendonça Filho, Maira Iabrudi, Marcelo Lordello
- Sound design: Kleber Mendonça Filho
- Sound mixer: Ricardo Cutz
- Editing: Matheus Farias, edt
- Archival footage research: Karina Nobre, Cleodon Pedro Coelho
