HOT DOCS ‘OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT AWARD’ - 2007
Heddy Honigmann is a true master of the documentary form. With a career spanning more than 20 years, her body of work includes documentaries and fiction features. Internationally acclaimed and respected, her work has garnered awards from festivals and praise from critics around the world and has provided inspiration for emerging and veteran doc filmmakers alike with her singular style and remarkable sensitivity.
On behalf of the Board of Directors at Hot Docs, tonight we are thrilled to welcome and honour one of documentary cinema’s great filmmakers, Heddy Honigmann, the recipient of the Hot Docs Outstanding Achievement Award for 2007. Not only do we do present this Award on behalf of Hot Docs, but on behalf of our audience and our visiting filmmakers who have looked forward to seeing, likely for the second and third times, her extraordinary films and to meeting the talented woman with the compassionate yet gently persistent voice behind the camera.
We are especially grateful that she could be here tonight as we are not the only festival who are celebrating her tremendous work this year. After this she is off to the San Francisco International Film Festival to accept their “Persistence of Vision Award” – a well deserved honour. And then after that she returns to her birthplace - Lima, Peru – to shoot her latest film. And I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say that we can’t wait to see the results of that trip. We wish her luck.
Journeying to foreign locales to look for stories is par for the course for Ms. Honigmann. Her films take us to Peru, France and the former Yugoslavia; they explore themes as diverse as war and remembrance, theft and crime, and the power and vitality of art and music. Most importantly, they intimately acquaint us with fascinating and memorable characters from all walks of life. Visually, her films are marked by beautifully composed images and elegant structures. But what makes her work truly sing is her astonishing ability to capture moments of profound emotional honesty.
Preferring to call her subjects “characters,” she develops unique relationships with them, akin to that between trusted friends, or as some have said, between therapist and patient. Whether they are philosophical taxi-drivers in Lima as in Metal and Melancholy; grieving widows and mothers in the former Yugoslavia in Good Husband, Dear Son; traumatized war veterans in Crazy; or elderly citizens of Rio de Janeiro sharing sexual exploits in O Amour Natural, she manages to make all of them forget that the camera is there with her well-placed, sensitive questions or her perceptive and sometimes humorous observations.
The power of art and music to provide solace and inspiration is a common theme in many of her films. In the award-winning Crazy, she takes an unusual approach to the subject of war and remembrance by asking Dutch UN soldiers to talk about a song or musical piece they listened to while on mission. In her newest film entitled Forever, we meet visitors to Paris’ Pere Lachaise cemetery who are either soothed or enlivened by the presence of the famous artists and writers who are laid to rest there.
Ms. Honigmann’s style of shooting is deceptively simple and straightforward. She has an eye for beauty and metaphor, and will often shift the camera away from her characters to film an image that gives expression to the emotional nuances she is capturing. In The Underground Orchestra, a journey through a community of international musicians who perform in the Metro in Paris, her interviews with the musicians are seamlessly interwoven with shots of Paris rooftops accompanied by the music they play. The film itself becomes like a piece of music, fluid and evocative.
While Ms. Honigmann has traveled the globe to film different cultures and various subjects, she is most interested in those stories that illuminate the human condition. Her boundless curiosity, compassion and cinematic artistry have yielded an incredible body of work where the universal experiences of her everyday characters—heartbreak, loss, longing, joy, triumph and sorrow—are revealed for their true and inestimable value.