In 2019, Brazil's Kleber Mendonça Filho won the Jury Prize at Cannes with his co-directed movie BACURAU. This year he returned to the fest to premiere a documentary about movies. Or more specifically, about the places we watch them.
In the second installment of our mini-season of conversations taped on location at Cannes '23, Filho tells host Rico Gagliano about PICTURES OF GHOSTS. It's his look back at the movie palaces in his home town of Recife, and how he's come to terms with how they — and lots of beloved city spaces — inevitably vanished.
Every May, the population of sleepy Cannes, France triples — as film pros and cinephiles from around the globe convene for the two-week movie-thon called the Cannes Film Festival. For the fourth season of the MUBI Podcast, we sent host Rico Gagliano into the eye of this celluloid storm, accompanied by an intrepid camera crew, to grab interviews with a cross-section of filmmakers who made Cannes 2023 one of the most celebrated in years.
Guests include legendary director Wim Wenders, perennial Cannes favorites Kleber Mendonca Filho and Monia Chokri, and a slew of new filmmakers destined to be world cinema's next wave — from Belgian hip-hopper-turned-auteur Baloji to New York's wry boundary-smasher Joanna Arnow.
Episodes air twice weekly. Follow and watch on Spotify or YouTube...or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.
MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.
In 2019, Brazil's Kleber Mendonça Filho won the Jury Prize at Cannes with his co-directed movie BACURAU. This year he returned to the fest to premiere a documentary about movies. Or more specifically, about the places we watch them.
In the second installment of our mini-season of conversations taped on location at Cannes '23, Filho tells host Rico Gagliano about PICTURES OF GHOSTS. It's his look back at the movie palaces in his home town of Recife, and how he's come to terms with how they — and lots of beloved city spaces — inevitably vanished.
Every May, the population of sleepy Cannes, France triples — as film pros and cinephiles from around the globe convene for the two-week movie-thon called the Cannes Film Festival. For the fourth season of the MUBI Podcast, we sent host Rico Gagliano into the eye of this celluloid storm, accompanied by an intrepid camera crew, to grab interviews with a cross-section of filmmakers who made Cannes 2023 one of the most celebrated in years.
Guests include legendary director Wim Wenders, perennial Cannes favorites Kleber Mendonca Filho and Monia Chokri, and a slew of new filmmakers destined to be world cinema's next wave — from Belgian hip-hopper-turned-auteur Baloji to New York's wry boundary-smasher Joanna Arnow.
Episodes air twice weekly. Follow and watch on Spotify or YouTube...or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.
MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.
Heads up audio listeners, you're about to hear a videotaped conversation. For the full experience you'll find the video version of this episode on Spotify or YouTube. Let's bathe in nostalgia for a second. What is your first memory of going to a theater and recognizing it as being like, this is a great place to be? My mother, she told that story many times. She took me to see a Tom and Jerry marathon at the San Luis Cinema. I was four... five, and I asked her what channel was that? With a very loud voice. In the theater, while you're in the theater? Yeah, yeah...- What channel?- That channel is this? You know.- Because you'd only seen TV?- Yeah. That is Cannes winner Kleber Mendonça Filho. He grew up to be maybe the most celebrated filmmaker in Brazil, and his latest movie is all about his life as a cinemagoer, or more accurately, about cinemas themselves. It's a documentary called Pictures of Ghosts, a look back at the movie palaces Filho grew up in and around in his hometown of Recife. Most of which are now gone. And right after the film debuted in a town, ironically full of cinemas, we talked about it. I'm Rico Gagliano. This is the MUBI podcast. Welcome back to our special season of conversations from the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. This is episode two Kleber Mendonça Filho on Pictures of Ghosts. Really briefly describe your movie 'cause it's very personal, and I'd like to hear from your point of view where it comes from and like how you would describe it. Well, I think it comes from images I have kept over many years. I shot a lot of the footage when I was still in university. At the time I had a very simple VHS camera, and I also shot still photographs, 35 millimeter. And at the time, the old movie palaces were closing from the thirties, forties and fifties. This is, what year? Very late eighties, early nineties. And I was very much aware that that would be gone in a few years. So I took pictures and I shot video. Over the last 30 years I kept these tapes and negative and... and slowly I got back to them about ten years ago and I thought the time was quite generous to the material. And that's when I thought that I could maybe... put something together, you know, like a film. What do you mean by "time was quite generous"? You take a photograph today and maybe next year you will look at it and say,"Oh, that's a nice photograph." But in about ten years it will begin to change because you have changed and maybe the person who is in the photograph is no longer around. Or maybe you don't talk anymore, or maybe you don't really wear those clothes anymore. And, uh, and maybe the look of the photograph and technology changes also. So a lot of these pictures, they were negative, black and white.- They began to change in a way.- Emotionally? Emotionally, aesthetically and what they mean. There is more to them than than there used to be when you first looked at them. And the same thing with video. For instance, I rediscovered this moment in the film where you can see the box office. It's a box office from the 1940s. It's completely intact. And uh, you know, the machine, the cash register, it's completely analog.- Yeah, big, huge, but...- Yeah. It becomes an interesting image because today you can get your phone- And buy a ticket for...- Anything....you're going to see in two weeks at 2:45 on a Wednesday. So I had all this footage and then I thought that I should look for more footage, more pictures from friends and archives. And I discovered that families are great archives. Each family has its own... archivist?- Archivist?- Yeah. It depends. Could be an uncle, a mother, a son, someone who takes care of the pictures and Super8, all Super8 reels. And also the Brazilian Cinematheque. And I kept finding things. And each time you find something and the film changes. And it was, uh, yeah, it was a fascinating process. So at base, it's about the vanishing of these movie palaces. But you start with a fairly lengthy, it's like a half an hour of the film- on your own house in Recife.- Yeah. Which is not far from a lot of these palaces. But why start there? First of all, I, when we were editing, I wasn't really happy with how pragmatic the film was in terms of making a film about movie palaces. Coincidentally, we we were about to move- Your family?- Yeah, my family. It wasn't easy to leave that place. I had made many films in that place, you know, it was our home, but it was also a film set because I started making all these short films 30 years ago, 33 years ago. And then I thought that it wasn't so different to think about the... the city center and also to think about my house because it's been shot so many times from so many different angles. And I thought that that could be an interesting take on space. And that's kind of what, my take away from this is that it's not even just about movie theaters. It's about our relationship to buildings.- Spaces.- And spaces.- Yeah,- I also spoke to Wim Wenders this week. He, who's got a film here at Cannes, he has said that he, in a different life, would be an architect. And I know that I've heard other filmmakers refer to this and I wonder if we, meaning cinephiles, people who spend a lot of time in movie theaters, I wonder if because we grow up in buildings, having these incredibly heightened experiences like over and over and over again often in very specific buildings, if that makes us more into places. Well, it's an interesting theory. I myself considered architecture when I was about to apply.- Seriously?- Yeah, to university. But then I found that there was quite a lot of maths... So I decided to go for journalism. And then my brother did the architecture.- He's an architect.- He's in the movie. Yeah, he's in the film and uh, but yeah, but I'm fascinated by architecture and by the way we shoot architecture... the way we translate space into film. I'm not really into... there is a certain style in filmmaking where you don't see... I mean, the face is in focus, but everything else, the ear would be out of focus already and you can't see where the character is. And maybe there is a dramatic function for that. But the whole film like that, you know, I want to see where he or she is.- Yeah. Spaces are important.- Yeah. Yeah. So I grew up in a town called Pittsburgh and there's a public TV station there, and they have a series called Things That Aren't There Anymore. And it's basically exactly your film. It is, but in a totally different and far more like straightforward way. It's, and I love it by the way, but it's like, "Wasn't it great back then?" Remember this old thing? Isn't that cool? And that's not the movie that you've made. How did you keep yourself from making that kind of movie? Because I think it would be very easy to be like, "Oh God, I love this place." Isn't that wonderful? Well, I probably would have made that film 15 years ago. But since then, I think I learned... that cities change. They change organically, and sometimes they change in a brutal way. Just because a group wants to make a ton of cash and then they pull the strings and then they make things happen. Or they make places disappear. That's not organic. But it is organic, if you think in terms of corruption as being part of life in society. And I think cities, uh, especially under heavy capitalist system, they often change in brutal ways. And I think that happens more often in the Americas, and in Asia. North America, Central America and Latin America. Cities change in a very brutal... a lot of demolition. And of course, it's fascinating. I mean, coming to the Cannes Film Festival, just the city itself doesn't change, but the structure for the festival keeps changing. Like the hotel now is not the Grand Hotel.- Oh, yeah, that's right.- It's something else. This hotel is the Mondrian where were just outside the Mondrian. Yeah. So yesterday I was given the information to come to the Mondrian and said,"I don't know where and, what is this?" And then I later I found out that it's just the Grand Hotel. So, uh, your internal map keeps... Not, it doesn't change because it's your map, but you have to change it because changes have been made to the map, you know. And I think it's fascinating, you know. But the difference being that you now accept that? Or are fascinated by it less than being kind of like.- "Oh remember that grand old thing?"- Well, yeah. I mean, I could still insist, yeah, I gave an interview at the Grand Hotel today, but it isn't, you know, so... But I did not want to fall into that trap. And, "Oh, when things used to be so much cooler in the past" you know, And it's not... I think there are great things about today. But you do at a certain point say there's been a loss to these cities because these movie palaces are going. Movie marquees... It's the marquee specifically that you think is the loss? The marquee specifically. Yeah. Explain why, I now remember why. Because I look... this is something that I loved and marquees are pretty much gone. Even the last one in in Sao Paulo now, one of my favorite movie theaters they, they used to have a marquee up until before the pandemic. And now it's gone... Because it's too complicated to put the...- The letters up?- Yeah the... But what I used to like about the marquees is that it really felt like you were witnessing messages being exchanged between cinemas and between the street and the cinema. So we would walk by"Strange Bird of Youth." All right... why not?- If you don't know the movie?- Yeah, it's... It's like a strange message. So in a way, I miss that. But it doesn't mean that the past was better. You know, The Veneza Cinema was a great cinema, and it... it's gone now, but we still have the São Luiz which is like a time machine with a thousand seats. It's true. And you do, end......almost end on the São Luiz. By the way, what do you want us to take from that ending on the São Luiz? Do you, is this a message of hope? Is it a message of, you know, let's preserve these things, what? Well, the fact that it still exists it's quite hopeful because most cities have not been able to save... Um, I mean, as far as I know, Manhattan has not been able to save any of the great movie palaces, maybe up in the Bronx. Something? I'm sure somebody will write in to tell us that there are palaces, probably several of them, but I'm not sure and certainly not a lot of them. I thought the Ziegfeld was the last one. I mean, the Radio City Music Hall is still there,- but I don't think they show films there.- Yeah. Or Sao Paulo, for example, is an amazing city and they haven't been able to save anything. Or they wished... They made the decision not to save anything. Recife has two. Sydney has the state theater. San Francisco has the Castro, but the Castro has changed recently a little bit. It's more music... orientated. L.A., I'm happy to say, has many, but you would think so. L.A. has many. And L.A. has a strange... geography because it has, it has almost like a cemetery of cinemas that don't really work anymore.- You're talking about Downtown?- Yeah. Some of them are reopening. Some of them are reopening. But mostly as concert halls.- Yeah.- That's specifically in Downtown. There used to be a stretch where there was like one every block and a lot of them are concert halls. It's one of the... I'm fascinated by movie palaces it's one of the most fascinating areas... Downtown L.A. Let's talk about the very ending of the movie, though, which I won't, I'll try not to give spoilers. Is very unlike the rest of the movie. It's a little fictional coda at the end starring you in an Uber. And my takeaway from it, without giving away the twist, is that it's... like it shows some... trepidation, let's say, about like the coming A.I... A.I.? No I never... Not really. I think the scene is really about... It sucks that we can't tell what people what we're talking about.- It's a very...- We haven't had a car in the last 11 months and we're really happy with... that new situation. Not having a car is quite liberating. And I've been using taxis and and you know, these transport apps and Uber. And then, but it was an idea that I had been thinking for many years. I've been making the film for many years. To end the film with me in an Uber. But then on the day we were going to shoot, you know, you spent so much money to shoot something like that. You get the equipment and the actor, and I began to worry that we didn't really have anything to say in the car. And that's when I wrote the actual dialog. And I called a friend of mine who works with VFX and said, "Can I do this?""Oh, yeah, it's really easy."- There is a special effect involved.- Yeah, yeah.- Again, with everything...- Simple and cheap, you know. But it works.- Yeah.- It does. But... But you don't think it has anything... oh, let's just say again, without giving the thing away, I feel like it alludes to driverless cars.- The coming of driverless.- Oh, really?- Oh...- That's what it evoked in me. Maybe that's 'cause I live in L.A. where, like, those actually are starting to happen. Interesting. No, I really think it's about some ghostly... incidents. You want it to be taken as a little bit of a spiritual moment? Well, I mean, you... I mean, it's also your film once you see it. I mean, you have your own, you can have your own take on the... it's actually an interesting take about A.I. But it never crossed my mind. It was really about... strange... things that happen at night in a city. You know, I really like that idea. For example, we have the vampire from wonderful 1981 short film, local Recife short film. from Jomard Muniz de Britto. I mean, he's seen it three times in the film. Yeah, you show this clip several times. He's kind of like bat-like, this guy wearing a cape going down. Yeah, Nosferatu kind of. But, well, the... so then do you think that's the connection this coda has to the rest of the movie is this idea of strange things happening at night. I think of cinemas, even though they have matinees, obviously, I think of it as a night time activity. Is that like, is it part of that fabric? Well, I really like the... at least my feeling that the first part has nothing to do with the second part. And the... and the coda has really nothing to do with the rest of the film. But of course I know that they are all interconnected in my mind. Maybe there is a personal logic to it, you know, but it's a film about ghosts and places that don't exist anymore. And I really love the idea that someone is so proud of his ability to just not be there.- Yes.- We've just given away the... And do you, do you care? Kind of, not really. I haven't really given everything away, but not being there could mean many things. but it's also a good image in film, I think, not being there. The last shot of the film, though, is you looking out the car. Well, I don't know if it's specifically you, but it's shots out the car window and it's of a fairly bland landscape. And it's mostly, I don't, I'm sorry that I don't speak Portuguese, so I can't translate all the signage that you see, but it seems like it's mostly like drugstores. Drug stores. Yeah. That's the last image rather than these grand movie palaces. It's a... it feels like a downer to me, even though you're saying that it's like it wasn't better back then. It feels like it was in that case, a little better back then. I can't help noticing when I go back home at night, we drove, we drive by a lot of drugstores. And it's... I think it's kind of funny and sad and, uh... and it's, it's an interesting image because they are so bright. It's almost like, oh, another drugstore. I think it's a good image. I'm not sure what it means. It's probably a bit of a downer. Yeah, Yeah. And they're open 24 hours. Kleber Mendonça Filho, his movie Pictures of Ghosts is coming soon. If possible, do try to see it in an actual cinema near you. You don't know what you've got til it's gone, people. Meanwhile, this episode of the MUBI Podcast was hosted and written by me, Rico Gagliano. Ciara McEniff is our booking producer. Amos Levin edited the show, and Michelle Cho is our supervising editor. Yuri Suzuki composed our theme music. Our camera crew in Cannes included Cedric Hazard, Alice Desplats, Rob Godfrey, Solal Coulon, and Mathis Toti. Special thanks to MUBI's team in Cannes, Elodie Fagan, Eric Issenberg, Sam Leter, Ilyass Malki and Josefina Perez-Portillo. This series is executive produced by me along with Jon Barrenechea, Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca, And of course, to stream the best in cinema, head over to mubi.com to start watching. Next episode it's my chat with Quebecois director star and Cannes favorite Monia Chokri.
Until then, travel tip:if you order a martini in France, they'll give you a vermouth on the rocks.