Following his epic Bacurau, Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho returned to Cannes Film Festival this year with Pictures of Ghosts, a bittersweet, fascinating look at his personal cinematic life. Utilizing archive documentary, mystery, film clips, and personal memories to bring back to life downtown Recife’s classic movie palaces from the 20th century, many of which are mostly gone, the film will stop by TIFF and NYFF followed by a release from Grasshopper Film and now the first trailer has arrived.
David Katz said in his review, “If the death of cinema is imminent, at least Kleber Mendonça Filho can play it out with some vintage Tropicália. It’s becoming a nice leitmotif of the Brazilian director’s career, whose ultraviolent Bacurau curtain-raised with Gal Costa’s “Não Identificado,” and latest effort Pictures of Ghosts, which premiered as a Special Screening at Cannes, eases in with Tom Zé’s deceptively jaunty “Happy End.” This is a first-person, arguably selfish movie––in that associated genre, the docu-essay––where Mendonça Filho seems to be waving a teary-eyed goodbye to valuable associations and possessions, perhaps only those of individual sentimental resonance. Yet it’s “selfish” in a productive manner, almost as a function of self-care, like a sunny afternoon lounging on the settee revisiting one’s favorite LPs.”
See the trailer below.