Heddy Honigmann: In Focus (1988-2011)

At last, 13 films from one of the great and most personal documentary filmmakers have been collected in a boxset, including many not available before on home media.

Heddy Honigmann's subjects are often people with shifting, marginal or devastated lives – shopkeepers surviving an economic crisis by working as taxi drivers (Metal and Melancholy, 1994), elderly people in Rio de Janeiro (O Amor Natural, 1996), immigrant musicians working the Paris metro (Underground Orchestra, 1998), a village of war widows with massacred husbands and sons (Good Husband, Dear Son, 2002), Cuban exiles in New Jersey (Give Me Your Hand, 2004) and street children in Lima (Oblivion, 2008) – to whom music, art, literature and memory are a source of comfort and life force – O Amor Natural (1996), Underground Orchestra (1998), Crazy (1999), Good Husband, Dear Son (2002), Give Me Your Hand (2004) and Forever (2006).

The following are listed in their order in the boxset:

O Amor Natural (1996)
Older residents of Rio de Janeiro give voice to the erotic poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade and recall passions of their own. "A touching fresco of art, memory, and desire."

Underground Orchestra (1998)
Gypsy, South American and black and other exile musicians work the Paris streets and underground Metro: their lives as outsiders in society, the art that offers them comfort in their daily struggle for survival, their memories of their homeland and the people they have lost.

Metal and Melancholy (1994)
After 10 years of economic meltdown, political turbulence, death and conflict, formerly middle-class people survive Peru's economic collapse by driving cabs in Lima, relaxed, persevering, nakedly emotional, and tougher than seat leather.

Crazy (1999)
The traumatic effects of war on the soldiers of United Nations peacekeeping missions, based on their reminiscences about their various battlefields, while listening to the music that sustained them because "music and smell are the most powerful carriers of emotion".

Oblivion (2008)
Honigmann returns to her birthplace of Lima, Peru to find a place and people retaining their dignity, despite catastrophic hyperinflation and human rights abuses that have left them almost broken. A lucid, moving and quietly angry movie.

Forever (2006)
A film about the people and places in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, showing the power and vitality of art in a place where love and death go hand in hand and beauty lives on.

Give Me Your Hand (2004)
A group of exiled Cubans dance the Rumba at their "home away from home", La Esquina Habanera nightclub in Union City, NJ, revealing their hopes, dreams, schemes and small dramas.

Good Husband, Dear Son (2002)
Women in a small village outside Sarajevo, where 80% of the men were massacred in 1992 by Serbian forces, tell stories about their lost husbands and sons. A film about memory and survival.

And Then One Day (2011)
A young Moroccan woman, faced with a sudden ban on headscarves, finds a creative way to skirt the law.

Mindshadows (1988)
A Dutch couple face the husband's rapid onset of senility during a snowy winter in Northeastern Canada. The film recounts the man's fight within himself and the story of his wife, who feels abandoned but keeps giving her love. Based on the novel by J. Bernlef.

Your Opinion, Please (1989)
A young woman witnesses a murder on the street and, pursued by the attacker, escapes to a movie theater and into the arms and life of the stranger sitting next to her.

Goodbye (1995)
A woman falls in love with a Belgian man and finds out too late that he's married. The man struggles between his two loves, and the woman is unable to finish the hopeless and dangerous relationship. The title refers ironically to going away forever and then coming back again. "An achingly true account of consuming passion with an almost unbearably intense sexual and emotional charge… a drama of observational acuity."

Four Times My Heart (1990)
Four young women with four different personalities – the Dreamer, the Temptress, the Belligerent One, the Shy One – have conversations with themselves, revealing four different approaches to desire and connection.


O Amor Natural (1996) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137355/
Underground Orchestra (1998) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138677/
Metal and Melancholy (1994) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107558/
Crazy (1999) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0240433/
Oblivion (2008) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1444306/
Forever (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0906743/
Give Me Your Hand (2004) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0397381/
Good Husband, Dear Son (2002) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0367810/
And Then One Day (2011) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2155316/
Mindshadows (1988) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0190450/
Your Opinion, Please (1989) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0211094/
Goodbye (1995) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114701/
Four Times My Heart (1990) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9063300/




All thanks to the original uploader