Pictures of Ghosts review – Brazilian auteur haunted by his home town’s decline

Kleber Mendonça Filho offers a poetic but somewhat unfocused memoir-essay about place, cinema and time

Home is clearly where the art is for Bacurau director Kleber Mendonça Filho, whose childhood apartment is the locus of the first part of this poetic but somewhat bemused memoir-essay about place, cinema and time. Twice renovated by his historian mother, the apartment was the site of his first early imaginative forays behind the camera, and appeared in his first two features, Neighbouring Sounds from 2012 and, four years later, Aquarius. Mendonça’s native city of Recife has also been subject to similar remodellings, as shown in the second and third parts here, through the decline of its cinema houses. As they fall into dereliction, it feels like a form of collective dementia, robbing its citizens of a shared cultural continuity.

In Neighbouring Sounds, Mendonça has an almost diagrammatic way of shooting his street and continues in the same vein here. Interweaving his family’s history with home-video excerpts and his later feature-film deployments, it’s as if he is trying to fix the essence of the place. Nico, the long-deceased dog next door, is resurrected thanks to clips from Mendonça’s debut, in which his incessant barking became part of the plot. Art can be an act of resurrection – or an exhumation: a bleary inexplicable phantom figure appears in a negative of the director’s living room, though it is not his mother who died aged 54 of cancer. The director’s sleepy voice sifts this flotsam of art and life. “It may seem like I’m talking about methodology, but I’m talking about love.”