It’s about stasis and change, memory and loss, art and commerce as well as a struggle for sovereignty. A nuanced, idiosyncratic drama set in his hometown, Recife, a northeastern port city on the Atlantic coast, it centers on a music critic (Sônia Braga), her circle of intimates, the enviably ocean-facing apartment in which she lives and the gentrification that she resists. “Fiction films are the best documentaries,” as a character in a movie says here.Ī film critic turned filmmaker, Mendonça Filho is best known for his own fictional movies, most notably “Aquarius” (2016). The results unfold at the crossroads of fiction and documentary, a space that Mendonça Filho knows well. Divided into three fluidly edited sections that build into a cohesive whole, the movie draws from both original and archival material, including photographs, newsreels, home movies, amateur films and images sampled from Mendonça Filho’s features. Love suffuses “Pictures of Ghosts,” a cleareyed, deeply personal and formally inspired rumination on life, death, family, movies and those complicated, invariably haunted places we call home. After the tape abruptly cuts off, he says in voice-over, “it may seem like I’m discussing methodology” - as if speaking now both for his mother and for himself - “but I’m talking about love.” In close-up, she discusses gathering information left out of history, an approach that her son has embraced here. It’s of a 1981 TV interview with his mother, Joselice, a historian who died at age 54. Early in “Pictures of Ghosts,” an exhilarating documentary about specters onscreen and off, the Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, pulls out a VHS tape.
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