It now seems almost obligatory in the career of every filmmaker to make the transition to the most intimate, autobiographical, strictly personal film: from Spielberg to Sorrentino, from Almodovar to Lars von Trier. Talk about yourself and tell about your cinema through yourself, through your relationship with the seventh art. Yet in this appeal which has absolutely no one missing, there are those who still manage to do so with truly explosive strength and vitality. Thus Kleber Mendonça Filho, the great Brazilian gaze behind the magic of Neighbouring Sounds, Acquarius and Bacurau, creates his spiritual testament, a sentimental topography, dedicating it precisely first of all to a city, Recife, and to its ghostly places called cinema halls. In an ideal parallelism between cinema and his life, between his family home and his neighborhood, the director lays himself bare from the inside, revealing the background of a cinema, his first and foremost ("It was the our home, it was there”), which grew and transformed together with the city.
So also in the documentary his unique research on spaces as an inexhaustible source of human change continues, in this case too the ghosts of the title wander among the ruins of closed cinemas with "a key of tears" as the manager epigraphs of one of these at the moment of farewell. Wandering souls looking for new spectators, or perhaps just new ritual, rather than sacred, places in which to exist again. They are the ghosts of A Ghost Story, who are not scary, they only haunt out of desperate love, for a body that has been erased, for a building that has evaporated, like the chairs in the Trianon cinema that no longer exist, like the projectors that are turned off , no longer replaceable even by the clasped hands with which little Sammy Fabelman/Spielberg showed his family his amazed creations on film. Thus the illuminated signs, subliminal indicators of the time, also become silent witnesses of the irreversible transformation. Meanwhile, the pulsating cellulose organs of the cinema expire fatally, dematerializing before the eyes of those who have always gone there, infinite monuments of our eternal dreaming, where the latest blenders are now sold.
Even myself, at just 25 years old, witnessed that unfortunate moment of the closure of a small city hall of great affection, in the time of digitalisation and gentrification. Because if nature occupies the spaces, man invades them.
But in Recife everything seems different, the ideal equator of many stories of demolitions, between bars, gates and barbed wire. Of a center full of cinemas, but without money and without air conditioning, with the smell of the tide, of fruit and piss. In Recife the reruns of The Godfather settle with an almost exotic gravity, which is a bit reminiscent of that irreverent heroism of Talking About Trees (another masterpiece documentary) in which 4 director friends desperately tried to bring Sudan Islamic theaters and cinemas to children who had never seen it (and therefore not even dreamed of it). But here there is no nostalgia or resistance. Time passes and under the dystopian verticalization of the redistributed spaces the places are transformed, so too does the opportunity to inhabit them again with curious eyes. A history (of seized films and carnival Nazi plots) made not only by the stories of those who lived there, but above all by the objects and images indelibly imprinted in the collective memory, an indestructible archive of our future (the director's own mother - to whom the film seems equally dedicated - we are told she is a historian expert in oral tradition).
There was a church, which became a cinema, returned to being a church or a shopping centre. Different temples for different times.
But they will never be able to demolish that passion and replace it with something else.
Our ghosts are more alive than ever, invisible, they remain still, where they have always been.
“It may seem that I am talking about methodology, but in reality I am talking about love”.
From Il Buio In Sala - Report of the 41 Torino Film Festival (2023)
