Hauntings of the Past to Shake Utopias in the Present
Vanessa Santos e Pedro Veras

Apparitions, illusions, and specters. Ghosts can haunt a house, a territory. They can make themselves present in the trauma of a family, in the memory of a community. They insinuate themselves into images that, in a certain way, struggle to survive. Supernatural, they resurface as that which seemed defeated but never completely disappeared. They can inhabit political history itself, because a ghost is also that which has been systematically erased, silenced, or made invisible by power relations, and which, precisely because it has not been fully acknowledged, insists on returning and haunting us. When Avery Gordon (1997) invokes the notion of haunting, she gives form to this ghost that, so to speak, enters into a pact with haunting itself; a ghost that appears when something demands to be seen, when an interrupted history continues to produce consequences. This is not necessarily a ghost that returns from the beyond to punish, but to demand recognition.

A ghost that confronts us, above all, in the present. If, as Serge Margel (2017) argues, our contemporaneity is configured as a “spectral society,” in which subjectivity has been expelled from individuals’ experience, it is worth asking: could ghosts themselves not be bearers of a force of rupture, capable of unsettling the very place where collective illusion, a univocal discourse, and the erasure of singularities are produced? The exhibition Phantasmagoric Presences is grounded in a wager on the power of these ghosts to make us confront the histories hidden in gaps, tears, and silences. The films gathered here embody all these ghosts that come to life in cinema to haunt the present.
In the first screening, the ghost appears as a presence. But even when the supernatural is at the center of the narrative, what haunts is rarely just a creature or an apparition. In Interview with Ghosts (Entrevista com fantasmas, Lincoln Péricles LK, 2026), the very existence of cinema is called into question. There is a cinema that does not exist, and the ghost lies in this impossible image, in that which disappeared but left traces. Someday the night will come (Um dia llegará la noche, Chica Barbosa, 2025) blends a mythical figure from Mayan folklore with family heritage and the ghosts of alcoholism, death, and despair. Myth is not separate from life; it gives form to what a family and a community carry with them.
In Those who never left (2025), Pierre Mouzannar brings the Lebanese War into the private sphere, recounting the chronicle of a family forced into exile. But the ghosts remain, claiming a right to history for that place. Domestic architecture becomes an archive of an absent life. Multo (Weimer Coleman, 2026), meanwhile, turns the colonial past into an unsettling presence in a house occupied by American missionaries in the Philippines. Blue Silence (Silencio Azul, Matías Rojas Cruz, 2025) evokes a ghostly atmosphere that emerges as the memory of a tragedy that remains inscribed in the sea and the landscape; while The Leap (El Paso Roberto Tarazona, 2025) follows two boys in pursuit of a monster that seems to concentrate what a community knows but cannot or does not want to say. In this case, the ghost can also be the form that silence finds in order to speak.

In the second screening, supernatural apparitions give way to the ghost of communism and dictatorships, shifting the phantasmagoria toward political history. What haunts are the archives, objects, testimonies, and utopias that regimes attempted to erase, or even collective projects that continue to inhabit the imaginary of the present. Olinda’s Golden Arches (Os arcos dourados de Olinda, Douglas Henrique, 2025) brings back a kind of late Cold War by retelling the historic dispute over the city’s mayoralty alongside the cultural battle waged between the Big Mac and the X-Tudo. In Filme Pin (María Rojas Arias and Andrés Jurado, 2026), small objects become material traces of stories of exile and resistance to fascism and colonialism. Dead Tongue (Lengua Muerta, José Jiménez, 2025) confronts one of the most violent ghosts in Latin American history: the Chilean dictatorship, whose inability to articulate the horror remains inscribed in the body and the landscape. The film searches for fragments that might construct an account of the most powerful agent of repression, Íngrid Olderöck, whose cruel methods could not be erased. Finally, in A film to remind us of utopia (Um filme para lembrar da utopia, 2026), Reinaldo Cardenuto mobilizes archives to bring back a Brazilian project of social transformation that never came to fruition, but continues to exist as desire, memory, and possibility.

The ghost is not only that which returns from the past, but that which the present has failed to make disappear. In times of an excess of images and so many mechanisms of erasure, the exhibition asks what cinema can do in the face of these presences: for the dead, the disappeared, and the forgotten; for untold stories, unacknowledged violence, and utopias that continue to haunt us and to resist being defeated.

References
GORDON, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

MARGEL, Serge. Arqueologia do fantasma: técnica, cinema, etnografia, arquivo. Belo Horizonte: Relicário Edições, 2017.