‘Ghost Portraits’
Manager: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Gender: Documentary
Year: 2023
Premiere: 1/11/23
★★★★
The family home in Recife, where Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho grew up and shot his first amateur films, is divided into three parts, which are about a number of large cinemas and other cinemas that have disappeared over time in the same city. Turning into evangelical churches since the late 80s, ‘Ghost Portraits’ is a documentary about individual and collective feelings about cinema and the passage of time. Since the director of the movie ‘Bacurau’ showed how he filmed a ghostly presence in that house in Recife, which was also transformed by his mother’s decision, some of the ghost portraits were shot twice, and he also talked about the cinema and the space that this house occupies when projected into the cinema. as if the screen of a collective room were a fantastic place between reality and unreality; The hybridization between fiction and documentary is well established today.
At one point in the movie he talks about exactly this. Eisenstein said that fiction films are the best documentaries.. They are representative, but they do not neglect to document the reality of their time. The same thing happens with such documentaries, which are turned into ghostly fictions, which shape the character of many people and tell of a time and places that, like many films today, have been forgotten, reduced to a spectrum in memory.