Pictures of Ghosts

Film - 2023

8,0

9.8K

Pictures of Ghosts it's a movie with Kleber Mendonça Filho, Rubens Santos, Alexandre Moura, Joselice Jucá, Sonia Braga Full cast. Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho. Original title Retratos Fantasmas, runtime 93 minutes. Genre Documentary.

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Riccardo Simoncini

By now it 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 Neighboring Sounds, Acquarius and Bacurau, creates his spiritual testament, a sentimental topography, dedicating it to a city first and foremost, Recife, and to those ghostly places called cinema halls. In an ideal parallelism between cinema and his life, between his family home and his neighbourhood, the director lays himself bare from the inside, revealing the background of a cinema, his first and foremost ("It was our house, was there”), which grew and transformed together with the city. Thus also in the documentary his unique research on spaces as an inexhaustible source of human change continues, even in this case the ghosts of the title wander among the ruins of closed cinemas with "a key of tears" as the manager of one of these epigraphs 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 an obliterated body, for an evaporated building, like the chairs in the Trianon cinema which no longer exist, like the turned off projectors, which can no longer be replaced even by 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 Read all

plot

Downtown Recife’s classic movie palaces from the 20th century are mostly gone. That city area is now an archaeological site of sorts that reveals aspects of life in society which have been lost. And that’s just part of the story.