A neorealist ghost story, a documentary fable, a postcard from a vanishing world, Julia Murat’s “Found Memories” takes place in Jotuomba, a tiny, fictitious rural village in northern Brazil. To call Jotuomba a place that time forgot would be less a cliché than an accurate description, since the aging, dwindling population — a quarrelsome pair of shopkeepers, a haggard priest, an assortment of idle agricultural workers and dedicated drinkers — seems to exist beyond the reach of modernity.

Until, that is, a young photographer (Lisa E. Fávero) shows up, hoping to document the experiences and surroundings of these people, whose way of life has been consigned to oblivion in the wake of Brazil’s rapid development. They treat her with a combination of wariness and cordiality, and over time her curiosity deepens into something stranger and more intense.

Like her protagonist Ms. Murat is an unobtrusive observer with a strong and confident visual sense. The drama in “Found Memories” is subdued, sometimes almost invisible, but it moves with quiet assurance toward a startling conclusion. Its clever final plot twist adds a gratifying jolt of the uncanny to what is otherwise a charming, bittersweet meditation on the passage of time and the equivocal power of images to capture an older world at the moment of its disappearance.