OBLIVION

DIRECTED BY HEDDY HONIGMANN

“Suffused with feeling for its human subjects... Lucid, quietly moving and quietly angry…
Ms. Honigmann infuses her scenes with an intimacy that brings you close to her subjects without
making you feel as if you’d crossed some line…Capture(s) the night in eerie, spectral detail –
and with mercifully steady and attentive framing –
she comes across more like a deeply engaged visitor than like an interloper.”
– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
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“A casual city symphony… A tender, poetically aimless movie by someone who no longer dwells among these stoic people, but feels like she might be the only one who remembers them.”
– J. Hoberman, Village Voice


“CRITICS’ PICK. This astonishing documentary takes a contemplative look at Peru’s recent political history. Honigmann’s tapestry-in-motion gives a complicated, never-deafening voice to the oppressed while cherishing the importance of even the tiniest action, be it the proper preparation of the national drink (Pisco Sour) or a magic-hour cartwheel through a crosswalk.”
– Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York

“Extraordinarily intimate! So masterful, potent, and deceptively subtle.” – New York magazine

“One by one, I hope to convert the filmgoers of the world to the gospel of Heddy Honigmann,
the Peruvian-born, Netherlands-based director who is among the rarest treasures of the
documentary-film world. Simply put, she makes films about people most of the rest of us would never bother to look at, most often by befriending them and asking the simplest kinds of questions:
Talk about your parents or your children, your dreams and your memories, the work you do,
the happiest moments in your lives.”
– Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com

“A nicely tuned multi-voice meditation…
exhibits (Honigmann’s) usual expert eye full of wryly expressed quiet outrage.”
– Jay Weissberg, Variety

“Poetic in its structure and human in its storytelling. OBLIVION is poignant, filled with interviews that effortlessly speak volumes.”
– Sara Schieron, Box Office magazine

“The magnificent and super-human is not the only powerful subject for a documentary. Acclaimed Dutch director Heddy Honigmann bequeaths us with yet another of her beautiful paeans to the modest and humble of our world.”
– Karen Badt, The Huffington Post

BORN IN LIMA, PERU, EDUCATED IN ROME, AND FOR YEARS A RESIDENT OF AMSTERDAM, HEDDY HONIGMANN IS ONE OF THE WORLD’S FOREMOST DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKERS. She brings an international perspective to her subjects, be they musicians working the Paris metro (THE UNDERGROUND ORCHESTRA), visitors to Père Lachaise cemetery (FOREVER), Brazilian erotic poetry (O AMOR NATURAL), or the taxi drivers of Lima (METAL AND MELANCHOLY). We’ve been privileged to premiere each of these. With OBLIVION she returns to her beloved Lima and introduces us to its invisible citizens: from the bartender at a swanky hotel who has served a revolving door of presidents, to the street urchins who perform acrobatics in traffic for a few pennies. Critic John Anderson calls Honigmann’s films “appetizing antidepressants…by a real artist of nonfiction who champions the dispossessed without sermonizing … a woman who has taken us inside the hearts of subjects most other filmmakers would never have noticed.”

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THE NETHERLANDS / FRANCE / GERMANY • 2008 • 93 MINS.
IN SPANISH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES • ICARUS FILMS