Retratos Fantasmas

Kleber Mendonça Filho strikes again with another impressive film to his resume that is already perfect with the amazing ones "O Som ao Redor" ("Neighbouring Sounds"), "Aquarius" and "Bacurau". This time, he invests on a documentary about the classic cinema palaces from downtown Recife, showing through a magnificent archive of pictures and clips during their glory days as a scenery of important cultural influence and later on the closure of such spaces becoming either evangelical churches or just empty spaces waiting to get new proprietors.

The documentary is divided in three segments and for a brief moment audiences might feel that they don't fully have a connection with each other, specially the first one where he dwell about the apartment he grew up with his mother where he started to make his first films. They connect with each other pretty well, since it revolves about memories, nostalgia and how our view of the world around us change through the optic of films and the spaces in which they are made and the spaces of which they can be seen. As evidenced by his first two features, he used many locations from his childhood and teenage years to be important parts of the stories he wanted to tell.

The film main chorus comes at the second part and that's where we are most invested because there he remembers the theaters, their importance and the countless films exhibited there and the ones he saw growing before he became a filmmaker. He visited those places not just as a film watcher but also he made several registers through the years, interviewing people who worked there - brief scenes from his very first short "Homem de Projeção" are shown where he interviewed a veteran projectionist talking about his work.

Third act was a curious one and it closes with a small fictional moment that proves many points of everything that was said about those pictures of ghosts of the title (previously it was related with ghost-like imagery he captured on camera, or the unusual and spooky way he found out his film "O Som ao Redor" was being broadcast on regular TV). It revolves on the cinemas that were turned into churches, and I just loved the way he made the comparison of different places that have a certain thing in common which are the rituals, each place has its own and cinemas in a way are a religious experience to viewers, rooted in tradition, dogmas and beliefs.

To any film lover out there "Retratos Fantasmas" is a highly special film that talks to us an intimate way about the importance of film memory and also about the memory of such cinemas since there was a dramatic change in the way we consume films and theaters had died over the decades, specially the street ones and all of what's left were the cinema chains which are quite selective in what they show because they just want to get the business done instead of being a democratic place where there's actually movies for all audiences. Nope, it's mostly blockbusters. To the director, he tells us that the decadence of the old cinemas came because the money left town, that particular region kept losing its businesses. He never mentioned about the flowing of cinema chains, this is all me, and I'm not sure if it actually happened there (it usually does) abut he gives us a glimpse of hope that one old theater still remains there and it's still a hot spot for film buffs.

And all those memories were destined to fade in time...but not all that much because Kléber made sure to register that long period of time where cinema was one of the most special places to go, to escape a little from reality or maybe it find different alternatives to it, to deal with life in a better way. As proven here, it was those places and the films he watched that made him become the great director that he is, a masterful storyteller with many relevant topics to address and great stories to tell. I'm really proud of this film, an excellent proof of what great Brazilian cinema is and can be. 10/10.