24.04.24, 20:30, Pictures of Ghosts (2023)

"The life of a true cinephile is one constantly haunted by the dead, as the history of the movies is a corridor of ghosts." After The State of Things (1982) and The Pluto Moment (2018), KASKcinema is screening another phenomenal film about film, this time set in the Brazilian city of Recife. It was here that filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho fell in love with cinema. Now the drastic changes in Recife's architecture and gentrification inspire him to reflect. Amid the closed-down cinemas and other film ruins, Mendonça Filho launches a playful yet moving essay film about his childhood home, genre cinema and the Nazi ties of earlier film distribution.

Where the film effortlessly flows from one thing into another in terms of content, the editing does not lag behind. In the film, Mendonça Filho jumps smoothly from home videos to film clips, photographs and his own material. In this home is where the art is meta-movie, the filmmaker sketches a personal city map of his seaside metropolis. About love, life and about cinemas that were, tellingly, converted into churches.