THE GHOSTS

2011

Runtime: 31:41 Minutes

Excerpt from: Randy Kennedy’s ‘White Paint, Chocolate, and Postmodern Ghosts’, New York Times, January 26, 2011

In the winter of her bad year, the sun would set in Berlin around 4 in the afternoon, de Beer said. She started venturing out only at night, riding the U-Bahn subway trains alone with a notebook, trying to write. Then for two months she locked herself in a room with only a desk, a chair and a blanket, rarely coming out.

When she did, she had written the basic script for "The Ghosts," which follows three characters - a young woman, a record- store clerk and a money manager (played by Jon Spencer, singer and guitarist for the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, whom Ms. de Beer persuaded to act for the first time) - as they seek the help of the hypnotist to deal with loss and longing.

In doing so, they conjure up ghosts - frightening-looking ones, who owe a visual debt to Ms. de Beer's long fascination with horror films and, lately, to the particularly bloody 1970s Italian subgenre known as giallo. The ghosts seem to be challenging the viewer to decide whether they are mere memories or phantasms of a more substantial sort - or whether, in the end, it really matters.