FILMS/
FOREVER
Betirako
Tributes
Netherlands, 2006, 95 minutes
SHOWTIMES
Tue, May 1 / 08:00 / Kabuki / AWAR01K
Wed, May 2 / 07:00 / PFA / FORE02P
CREDITS
- dir
-
Heddy Honigmann
- prod
-
Carmen Cobos
- scr
-
Heddy Honigmann, Ester Gould, Judith Vreriks
- cam
-
Robert Alazraki
- editor
-
Danniel Danniel
- cast
-
Yoshino Kimura, Bertrand Beyern, Reza Khoddam, Bruno Douchet, Valérie Bajou, Christophe Menez, David Pouly, Stéphane Heuet
- source
-
First Run/Icarus Films, 32 Court Street, 21st Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11201 FAX: 718-488-8642 EMAIL: gary@frif.com
The Père-Lachaise Cemetery is the largest cemetery in Paris and the final repository of the famous. Among its occupants are medieval lovers Heloise and Abelard, modernist icons Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein and ’60s rocker Jim Morrison. Through its gates come tourists toting cameras to the burial site of Marcel Proust (though they might never have read him) and who sing at the gravesite of Yves Montand. Widows of well-remembered husbands, meanwhile, sweep their late spouses’ gravestones and water the flowers. Into this ripe milieu, Heddy Honigmann—Peruvian-born Dutch documentarian and career-long chronicler of dislocation—brings her unique perspective and boundless curiosity, looking for the key to art and eternity, the allure of a celebrity afterlife, and the solace to be found in a necropolis of stars. In a world of the disenfranchised, Honigmann often has given voice to the dispossessed—immigrant musicians in Paris, war widows in Bosnia, cab drivers in Lima. But like her sensual ode to Brazilian love poetry O Amor Natural (SFIFF 1997), Forever finds that time and memory are the more profound divisions between longing and reality. A young Japanese pianist seems to yearn across the ages at the grave of Frederic Chopin, while elsewhere at Père-Lachaise a middle-aged woman remembers the young husband who lies beneath her feet, dead three months after they wed. Honigmann has made a film of great tenderness as well as profound inquiry. She is never reticent about asking a question; her trademark is getting people to open up in ways that must surprise even them. But she exercises the greatest respect, even awe, for those who walk among the headstones or occupy the more ethereal world of Forever.
—John Anderson
In French with English subtitles. Sponsored by Jaman.