AFI Fest 2023: Pictures of Ghosts, Terrestrial Verses, and Tótem

By Micah Slater

Pictures of Ghosts

Q&As, for the most part, usually serve to disappoint me. There’s something in being a critic that always favors your own interpretation, something that borders on hostility for opinions that conflict or oppose. Pictures of Ghosts, among a very small and venerated host, was luckily made by someone who is actually able to talk about cinema, its history and repercussions, and his own memory, on terms that barely approach didactic or trite. Pictures of Ghosts is the type of recursion that film needs, right now—the ability to talk about itself on no uncertain terms, while simultaneously accommodating the uncertainty of memory and the future. 

Born in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, director/writer Kleber Mendonça Filho is uniquely qualified to talk about the history of its cinemas. Best known for Bacurau (2019) and Neighboring Sounds (2012) (the latter of which being filmed in Recife itself), the critic-turned-director spent most of his early life in the same apartment in the city, which is the unexpected first subject of this documentary. Mendonça Filho filmed countless shorts in this apartment, recut into Pictures in chronological order as a canvas on which he paints his family’s history. Viewers familiar with Bacurau can see the beginnings of many of his principal themes in these earlier works, as well as the distinct sense of familiarity inherent to shooting in the same space, over and over, for nearly thirty years.  Mendonça Filho’s mother, who warranted constant reference both in the film and the following Q&A, was herself an oral historian, a tradition that clearly suffuses itself into Pictures. Yet in this first segment, the most principal impart, and the momentum that carries the rest of the piece’s runtime, is a particularly tight spotlight on the intersection of space and time—how within and without Mendonça Filho’s childhood home, the passage of decades have left its mark on the city—and its cinemas.

Pictures of Ghosts loves its cinemas. It is a sense of deep and resounding care that brings its audience closest to these lost venues, many of them now demolished or—surprisingly—transformed, into shopping centers and churches. Many still stand vacant. However, Pictures repeatedly proves how little it actually cares for the present, simply by virtue of how little time it actually spends in it. Rife with archive and consumer video footage, Mendonça Filho proves his tenure with the sheer volume of stock he shot himself, over the course of his residence. 

Most of the footage taken outside of the apartment, much like the inside, is his, preserved for years out of the vested interest that made this film. Seven years in the making, Pictures of Ghosts does not speak of a fleeting interest. Instead, it takes a multi-faceted approach to the history of film in Recife, a well-balanced equal parts personal recollection and historical examination. From the life and death of a projectionist beloved by the filmmaker to a history of a theater that was intended as a cultural in for the German Nazi party in Brazil, the history here proves its own worthiness in spades. 

Descriptions of quality and efficacy aside, Pictures of Ghosts deserves recognition for its well-exposed and easily accessible dogma: cinema palaces are disappearing, a whole world slowly turning into churches, malls, offices, empty lots, and a history is disappearing with them. Pictures of Ghosts catch them right in the middle of the fade: still half-there, still visible, but going fast.

Terrestrial Verses

My goal at AFI was to see things that most people weren’t seeing. Aside from being a bit of a kneejerk contrarian, I wanted to write about films that won’t be seeing the level of discourse that many of the larger premieres would grant. Even if that hadn’t been the case, Terrestrial Verses would have caught my attention.

Cinema designed for didactic export to the West often become one-tone statement pieces, shying away from complexity in order to deliver the strongest possible message to a viewer. These Western audiences are (often rightfully) assumed to be very out of touch with the issue at hand, or simply unable to digest complex concepts and come away with the utilitarian message the film was created to impart. For Terrestrial Verses, this is duly true, but there is an added layer of urgency: almost as if it were ripped from an anecdote itself, filmmakers Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami were detained and prevented from leaving Iran after Verses premiered at Cannes this past May. 

Terrestrial Verses is formally very repetitive. Told in a series of head-and-shoulder one take interview shots, Iranian citizens are presented in flashbang moments where they are confronted with the oppressive system of bureaucracy in the country. Thankfully, the laws themselves are implicitly understood to be ridiculous; from a man who is not allowed to name his son David to a woman accused of driving without a hijab, the validity of these edicts is not in question. Asgari and Khatami make sure to direct attention elsewhere: within this system, faceless and formless, corruption and indulgent malice have festered, grown, and allowed for the exploitation of human beings by another. The comedy that supplants Verses’ slim runtime comes from the concrete, demonstrable violations of human rights in these codified laws; this is where the aforementioned one-tone statement pieces stop. However, Asgari and Khatami use this rote standard to force audiences into a deeper understanding of the regime, and what emerges is a film that—while openly boasting its plainness—makes a much more pointed attempt at subterfuge. Verses is not interested in the systems of oppression; they are merely the frame. Verses is not compelled by semantics; they are the groundwork. Terrestrial Verses indicts the people complicit in the bureaucracy, the people that expose the regime for what it truly is: a mile-deep stack of people foisting blame onto the person above them, citing policy, modesty. Verses, if its last scene is to be believed, is certain of what’s at the top. 

A decrepit, dying gerontocracy, beneath which Iran—in all of its structures, in all of its established, ostensibly functional civilization—is crumbling.

Tótem

Of the two Spanish-language films I caught this year with child protagonists (who are even visually similar. Strange how that works), Tótem is not necessarily the better film, but it does offer more to discussion than an admittedly generalized take on transgender children. Director Lila Avilés pulled a different tabloid topic than that: grief. Over the course of one day, a seven-year-old girl must come to terms with her father’s terminal illness. 

That’s not really what Tótem shows, though.

It shows insects crawling on the wall of the shower. It shows the broad leaves of a backyard garden. It shows a toddler hiding on top of a fridge. It shows the absurdity of party planning. Committing to limited perspective is an increasingly common choice for filmmakers with younger protagonists, and while that usually comes with some kind of simplification in narrative, Tótem has no particular qualms with that. No auspicious heights of storytelling are achieved here. Avilés wants to steep us in the tepid water of this family more than she wants to drag us along to any grand conclusion. Setting the film in Sol’s grandfather’s large, mid-century home is particularly helpful for this, allowing the film to move and breathe without ever leaving the premises. Apt of a story of atmosphere and place, the film ends on an empty bedroom.

Still, it is in no haste to get there: small asides and scenes with seemingly no connection to the rest of the story (and house) abound, and for a short while around the middle of the film, they’re all we see. Sol asks a voice assistant when the world will end. She crawls under tables and puts snails on family paintings. Tótem has nowhere particularly important to go; it’s waiting. A sense of dread begins to pervade in these innocent scenes, because by now, we’ve seen her father. We’ve heard from the adults the truth of his condition. Spending time with the person least equipped to comprehend either of those things transforms grief into small sips–whatever is very carefully told to Sol as determined by the people around her. 

In a particularly winding path, Tótem reaches grieving, but hardly with any urgency. Grief is everywhere, it says. The question is only if you’re able to get through to it.

Special thanks to the wonderful staff at AFI Fest this year, Sophia Fijman, and Pau Brunet-Fuertes. For a full list of everything I saw at AFI Fest 2023, check out this list here.