Rating: NR | Runtime: 93 minutes
Release Date: August 24th, 2023 / January 26th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Vitrine Filmes / Grasshopper Film / Gratitude Films
Director(s): Kleber Mendonça Filho
Writer(s): Kleber Mendonça Filho

Fictions are the best documentaries.

There’s a whisper during Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts wherein a man is telling another that fiction films can also be documentaries. This documentary proves how as Filho delves back into his personal collection of home movies and fiction features to give context and detail to memories and nostalgia about the Brazilian city in which he lives, Recife. The evolution of place through the decades captured become ghosts of the past now covered by graffiti and plaster … if they still exist at all.

The first chapter deals mostly with the apartment where he grew up and currently owns. He shot all his early films there and thus its transitions, as well as that of the neighboring buildings and community, are preserved for all to see. What remains the same? What is unrecognizable? It’s all about the stories within the story that continue into chapter two as Filho turns his focus upon the many old movie theaters now left in disrepair. And, in chapter three, those cinemas which were repurposed as churches for an evangelical surge within the country.

Filho narrates it himself, explaining the train of thoughts and avenues towards new research that were sparked by digitizing this footage. It’s an essay film about his life and career as much as a document of a city caught up in multiple wars—even being visited by the Hindenburg back when Hitler saw Recife’s theaters as the perfect staging ground for Nazism abroad—while being built-up and torn down by changing economic interests. It’s an ode to art, ephemera, and metamorphosis. A walk through time within a place both haunted and inspired by that which came before. That which is archived in plain sight for those willing to look.

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The screen at the Sao Luiz in Recife, Brazil from PICTURES OF GHOSTS; courtesy of Grasshopper Film.