Two years ago the European Film Awards nomination for best documentary for
Heddy Honigmann's
Forever was just one in a long series of national and international nominations and prizes which demonstrate the recognition her work has achieved from film critics, professional panels and the public. The San Francisco Film Society's Golden Gate Persistance of Vision Award (2007) and the Outstanding Achievement Award at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (2007) are among other recent tokens of appreciation for her work. Now she has been awarded as 'Best Director' during the Auckland Season of
DOCNZ, the only competitive documentary film festival in Australasia.
According to Karin Wolfs, who wrote an essay about this Dutch filmmaker’s oeuvre for the forthcoming issue of the yearbook
The Low Countries (due at the end of April 2009), Honigmann ‘always keeps the focus firmly on the unadorned storytellers, avoiding any prettification, because that would detract from what her work is all about: making visible the stories behind the faces.’
Honigmann got her DOCNZ award for
El Olvido (Oblivion, 2008 - see trailer with English subtitles
here), for which she returned to her birthplace, Lima in Peru, to create a portrait of a forgotten city, a forgotten people and a forgotten country: places and people that are only remembered when a major catastrophe happens or when its politics become relevant to other countries. In this documentary, however, politicians and rulers become faceless figures in a long line of corrupt administrations, whereas the common working-class people that are interviewed are endearing and charismatic in their graceful strength that is both inspiring and worth remembering. Waiters and barmen give the spectator their take on things. They are the ones who must struggle to survive because even their own presidents seem to have forgotten them.
In search of memories, Honigmann meets people who think back to a period of terrorism and violence that was somehow still better than the present circumstances of extreme poverty. And we meet children who are unable to have either good or bad recollections because the only thing they do is survive. But above all, as Wolfs remarks in
The Low Countries, Honigmann does not interview these people. She has a conversation with them. They are not just talking heads, but speaking faces coming to life through their stories, and therein lies a world of difference. To put it in Honigmann’s own words: ‘In
El Olvido a bird flies over this forgotten city and stops here and there; it flies again and finally becomes a crystal ball that a young man keeps in perfect balance, challenging anonymity.’
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