HOTDOCS to honour Heddy Honigmann
March 23rd, 2007 by Zsofia
Dutch filmmaker Heddy Honigmann will be the recipient of this year’s Outstanding Achievement Award at the Canadian documentary film festival HOTDOCS (April 19-29, 2007, Toronto). The programme will feature many of her films, including the most recent, “Forever“, on the famous Paris cemetery, Père Lachaise.
Elegant, effortless and intimate, Honigmann’s non-fiction films have addressed the role that art, and most often music, plays in our lives and memory. Her work has been described as “infused with the quietly transcendent beauty, sadness, loss and humour of being human”, and her subjects have included a rich range - from cab drivers in Peru to Iranian ex-pats in Paris.
“Forever” portrays Père Lachaise through documenting stories of lonely visitors who open up to share their stories of connection to the graves. The film focuses on some famous graves (Chopin, Proust, and Maria Callas among others) but also covers others. One of the visitors is a Japanese girl who loves Chopin’s music so much she moved to Paris to study the piano, and another is a woman who comes to visit the love of her life, who died tragically soon after they got married.
This year, HOTDOCS’s special section will focus on Central and Eastern Europe with a selection of provocative documentary films that reveal the diffuse political, social and cultural forces shaping the region. Films in the Spotlight on Central and Eastern Europe were selected from submissions received from nine countries, including Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.
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