Pictures of Ghosts review – the best of what cinema can offer

It seems to be required of established filmmakers to eventually make an autobiographical film of some kind. The results have sometimes been beautiful despite the risks of self-indulgence, arrogance and misplaced self-pity such an enterprise entails (Fellini’s 8½, Fosse’s All That Jazz, although even these can test my patience), but other times, the navel gazing doesn’t lead anywhere interesting (most recently, Sorrentino’s The Hand of God).

With his latest film, Pictures of Ghosts, Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho pushes the boundaries of this genre to make a passionate, melancholy yet never morose film about himself, his oeuvre and, most of all, his native city of Recife and how it shaped him as a director and as a person. It is this extension beyond but starting from his own experience that grants the film a wider resonance that any cinephile will respond to.

In the film’s first part, Mendonça Filho’s earnest, playful and naturally poetic narration accompanies footage that paints a picture of the apartment in which he grew up and lived for many years into his adulthood. Combining home movies, behind-the-scenes footage of the 10 to 13 films he made inside that flat, and clips from those finished films, the filmmaker reveals how, to him, there is no line separating cinema and real life. In a particularly touching scene, he explains how as a young filmmaker, he discovered that to better represent his street at night in his movies, he had to use artificial lighting – there is no contradiction between cinema trickery and “normality,” as he calls it. On the contrary.

When discussing his use of his home as a set in his films, Mendonça Filho first calls it a methodology, then corrects himself – it is, simply, love that has guided him throughout his career, from Neighbouring Sounds to Aquarius. He admits mischievously that when asked about the great set design of his films, he sometimes lies and says he hired someone to redecorate his home or that of his neighbour, perhaps because he wishes people had a greater trust in the beauty of the real world.

The film’s second part traces the history of the many cinemas that once populated downtown Recife and gave young Kleber his film education. “When we love, we have to say it,” he proclaims as he dives into both the minute details of these theatres that meant so much to him and the larger historical developments that changed them. As in most cities, it was better before: Mr. Alexandre, a legendary projectionist whom the filmmaker grew close to, says in an old video that he now hates The Godfather after it played (on film!) for four months after its release, an image that is both funny and moving when we look at the health of cinema attendance today.

From a cinema initially built to show nazi propaganda, to the presence then unspoken disappearance of American studios and, finally, to theatres being turned into churches, the evolution of Recife’s theatrical landscape reflects the tumultuous history of the country, yet what remains as a throughline across the decades is always the power of cinema itself. “Independent cinema helps build character,” according to Mendonça Filho, himself the living proof of that argument. With disco songs of the time and a playful editing that blends periods, formats and fact and fiction together, Pictures of Ghosts is the best of what cinema can offer – at once grounded in lived experience and whimsical in just the right doses, with a final flight of fancy that makes reality, once again, beautifully cinematic.

Pictures of Ghosts was screened as part of the Cannes Film Festival 2023. A UK release date is yet to be announced.