Architecture on Film: Pictures of Ghosts

PICTURES OF GHOSTS (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil, 2023, 93 mins) [London Premiere]

Kleber Mendonça Filho folds together personal and urban biography, architecture and filmmaking, to craft a map of his home town of Recife – through the lens of cinema, and the city’s cinemas.

In three chapters, followed by an enigmatic coda, the celebrated Brazilian director offers an ode to the city of Recife and its urban movie palaces, in a multifaceted exploration of the relationship between cinema and space.

Where Recife, the coastal capital of Pernambuco, was a richly investigated stage and co-protagonist in the director’s past features Aquarius and Neighbouring Sounds, Filho’s latest film turns to non-fiction to explore the physical place of cinema itself in the city’s built environment. Opening with his family’s Setubal Apartment – the director’s cinematic playground; a film set in all but one of his films – the film expands from the home to the city centre, to catalogue and pay tribute to the 20th century’s Cinemas of Downtown Recife, before looking at their present traces as Churches and Holy Ghosts.

Filho’s intimate conversational collage, warmly and searchingly narrated over 30 years of personal archive and new images, presents the entanglement of cinema, Brazilian society, and the director himself in the urban reality of Recife, and the projections - cinematic and other - of its buildings.