Reel Rundown: ‘Pictures of Ghosts’ navigates the complex emotions of nostalgia

One of the most poignant things that any newspaper can offer is a look at the past. Over the years The Spokesman-Review, for example, has on occasion run photos of old Spokane, with someone – often Jesse Tinsley – providing the historical background.

It would be easy to consider such efforts as simple exercises in nostalgia. But is looking back ever that uncomplicated? Doesn’t the very process, at least at times, evoke a full range of jumbled emotions?

Think of the meals you might have enjoyed at the old Crescent lunch counter. Or what Riverfront Park looked like before Expo ’74. Or what it meant to experience seeing a movie at any one of Spokane’s several, now closed, drive-in theaters. What feelings come bubbling up as a consequence?

Those are the kinds of questions that the Brazilian documentary filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho asks in his penetrating, if at times meandering, film “Pictures of Ghosts” (in Portuguese “Retratos Fantasmas”).

Streaming on the subscription streaming-service Criterion Channel, Filho’s film is a look back at the Brazilian coastal city of Recife where he lived as a youth. He particularly recalls Recife’s downtown neighborhood that, abandoned by today’s monied interests, is a battered, graffiti-adorned shell of its once-grand self.

In a sense, “Pictures of Ghosts” could be seen as a home movie. Filho spends much of the film’s first part exploring the apartment that his late mother purchased, renovated twice and created as a home for him and his siblings. But then he expands his view, taking in the larger neighborhood (particularly the dog-barking, termite-ridden house next door).

And he doesn’t stop there. He extends the scope of his film even farther, revealing the histories of the neighborhood movie theaters that he haunted as a boy – keying on their former grandeur as palaces of imagination (visited at times by the likes of Hollywood stars such as Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis). He contrasts that view with the empty hulks the buildings are now, either closed and locked or made over into other kinds of businesses.

In his blending of the past with the present, Filho augments his more personal moments with snippets from his own films. One of the most ambitious is 2016’s “Aquarius,” which stars the international star Sonia Braga and was filmed in the very apartment bequeathed to him by his mother.

To all this, Filho adds in archival footage of public celebrations such as the city’s famous annual “carnaval.” And all the while he offers his own reflections on everything from his love of cinema to the ways his downtown neighborhood has endured through its decline.

What we’re left with is his own sense of it all, how life passes and how the ways we feel about some of those passing events tend to endure – like the memories of the warm summer evening you may have spent watching, say, “Days of Thunder” at the North Cedar Drive-In.

Such memories often fuse into the kind of singular emotion that, in most cases, can be explained in one word.

Call it acceptance.