Urban Sales Boards Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Cannes’ Special Screening Film ‘Pictures of Ghosts’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Elsa Keslassy
·3 min read
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Frédéric Corvez’s Paris-based Urban Sales has boarded “Pictures of Ghosts”, the latest film of renowned Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho (“Aquarius”, “Bacurau”).

The movie, which marks Mendonça Filho’s fifth feature film, will world premiere at Cannes in the Special Screenings section.

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“Pictures of Ghosts” will mark the director’s third film to bow at Cannes, following two competition entries, “Bacurau” (co-directed by Juliano Dornelles) which won the Jury Prize n 2019, and “Aquarius” in 2016.

“Pictures of Ghosts” combines archive documentary, mystery, film clips and personal memories. The film is produced by Emilie Lesclaux at CinemaScópio Produções and co-produced by Silvia Cruz and Felipe Lopes’ Vitrine Filmes.

Described as a multidimensional journey through time, sound, architecture and filmmaking, “Pictures of Ghosts” is set in the urban landscape of Recife, located in the Brazilian coastal capital of Pernambuco. Having hosted dreams and progress, these places have also embodied a major transformation on social practices.

“Cinemas in city centers are common to many other places in the world, but it so happens that I am from Pernambuco, from Recife, and I set out to show this city’s geography from a personal point of view,” said Kleber. “Recife is also a city that still enjoys a spectacular cinema like São Luiz, a palace from 1952. Today, there are few cities in the world that still know what that represents,” Kleber continued.

Emilie Lesclaux, said “It is a joy and an honor to be back in the Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival with a project that is a different kind of work from the fiction films we have already presented there, from the production point of view, but that is as personal as ‘Aquarius’ and ‘Bacurau’ are. ‘Pictures of Ghosts’ brings themes that run through Kleber’s entire body of work. In fact, his first feature film is the documentary ‘Crítico’, from 2008,” recalls producer

Florencia Gil, a Brazil-native who heads up international sales at Urban, said she’s been “huge admirer of Kleber’s work and consider him as the number one reference for the new generation of Brazilian Filmmakers.”

“Pictures of Ghosts’ is the most personal piece of his filmography, a metaphysical but playful depiction of the end of cinema as we knew it. We couldn’t be more honored to defend this instant classic,” Gil continued.

“Pictures of Ghosts” was fully financed in Brazil, with the support of the Audiovisual Sector Fund (FSA-BRDE), and the National Cinema Agency (Ancine).

The film will be released in Brazil and Spain during the second half of this year by Vitrine Filmes, which handled Mendonça Filho’s previous films.

Urban Sales’s slate of movies slated for Cannes include the Mongolian-French debut “If Only I Could Hibernate” by Zoljargal Purevdash at Un Certain Regard and the French-Moroccan western “Deserts” by Faouzi Bensaïd at Directors Fortnight.

The company is also repping high-profile animated features, including “The Hermit and The Bear” by Marine Blin, “Into The Wonderwoods” by Vincent Paronnaud and Alexis Ducord and “Fox & Hare Save The Forest” by Mascha Halberstad, who recently won the director of the year award at Cartoon Movie.  Other titles on Urban’s roster include the Ukrainian drama “Do You Love Me?” which played at the Berlinale Panorama, the French road-movie “Amore Mio” by Guillaume Gouix, and the Moroccan comedy “Abdelinho” by Hicham Ayouch.

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