Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By

An epic, lyrical ode to amateur filmmakers who raise the quotidian to the highest levels of art, FLICKERING GHOSTS OF LOVES GONE BY is a personal and historical exploration of the home movie in all its unvarnished glory. Upon inheriting an enormous collection of amateur films, André Bonzel (codirector of MAN BITES DOG) incorporated the work of complete strangers into a narrated montage of his own family’s century-long moving-image scrapbook. In tracing his own conflation of sex and cinema through his family history, Bonzel plumbs his—as well as hundreds of others’—attempts to both preserve and reshape reality on celluloid, while in the process uncovering buried secrets, forgotten legacies, and some of the deepest motivations for capturing fleeting, everyday moments through the magic of a camera.