Pictures of Ghosts

A companion piece to Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent (“that film came out of this one,” he has said), Pictures of Ghosts is a lovely, relaxed, ruminative riff on movies, memory, the imaginative space conferred by that place we call Cinema. For Mendonça Filho, this is all bound up with his home city, Recife, which is also the setting for almost all his films, including his first shorts, Neighbouring Sounds, and the Oscar-nominated Aquarius. Looking back on his childhood in the 1970s, the director reflects on how much has changed to the urban spaces he knew, and in particular the cinemas that were his imaginative playground; now refashioned as shopping malls and evangelical churches (just like here). Seasoned with love and boundless anecdotes, Pictures of Ghosts becomes a film about our need to hold on to the past, both on a political and a personal level, and how the movies are uniquely suited to this task.

A cleareyed, deeply personal and formally inspired rumination on life, death, family, movies and those complicated, invariably haunted places we call home.

Manohla Dargis, New York Times

Not only is this the most cohesively focused documentary of its kind in years, but it’s also, as its title indicates, a bewitching reminder of the ways that film can serve as both a time machine and a way to see the spirits of the past.

Christopher Campbell, Nonfics

A wistful non-fiction memory piece that’s highly personal and yet deeply attuned to universal feelings about the forgotten and vanished past, it floats through time and space like a specter, seeking to locate and connect with other spirits—a process that’s filtered, always, through a cinematic lens. Pictures of Ghosts is an act of communion between a filmmaker, a setting, an art form and a shared past that can never be reclaimed and yet lives on in eternity, flickering brightly in the dark—so close and vibrant one can almost reach out and touch it—at twenty-four frames per second.

Nick Schager, Daily Beast