Renowned Peruvian-Dutch filmmaker Heddy Honigmann, passed away yesterday at the age of 70 from complications related to multiple sclerosis and cancer. An internationally-acclaimed documentarian, she build a solid filmography with over 40 titles in a career spanning over thirty years, being the subject of the film retrospective “Direct Address” at The Museum of Modern Art in 2003, and winning the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam’s (IDFA) Living Legend Award in 2013.
A daughter of Holocaust survivors, Honigmann was born in 1951 in Lima, Peru. She studied biology and literature at the University of Lima, and left the country in 1973 to travel abroad in Mexico, Israel, Spain and France. She enrolled at the prestigious Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome to study film, before moving to Amsterdam in the late seventies and making a film nearly every year, both documentaries and feature films.
Some of her most acclaimed productions include the 1996 documentary O Amor Natural Inspired by the erotic poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, in which the filmmaker visits the beaches and streets of Rio de Janeiro, conversing with elderly men and women, and thereby revealing the sustaining power of sex and the memory of desire; and the 1988 documentary The Underground Orchestra, that profiles undocumented immigrants who have fled political persecution in their own countries, and who make a living as musicians on the Metro and the sidewalks of Paris, thereby demonstrating their talent and their will to survive.
Honigmann also shot films in her homeland of Peru including the 1993 documentary Metal and Melancholy, an offbeat road movie roving the city of Lima, in which the filmmaker meets teachers, actors, professionals, civil servants and many others who have turned to taxi driving to earn enough to get by; and the 2008 documentary Oblivion, focusing on Peru's capital city of Lima, revealing its startling contrasts of wealth and poverty, and how its poorest citizens have survived decades of economic crisis, violence, denial of workers' rights, and corruption.
In 2021 she directed her last film There Is No Path / No hay camino, in which Honigmann, facing terminal illness, embarks on a self-reflective journey across Europe and to her birthplace in Peru, weaving together visits to beloved places and people with moments from her most important films.
In addition to MoMA, Honigmann also was honored with retrospectives at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Cinema Arsenal in Berlin, the Madrid Film Museum, the Pacific Film Archive in San Francisco, and the Paris Film Festival, among many other venues. Her films have won major awards at film festivals around the world, including the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco Film Festival, the Golden Pigeon at the Leipiz Film Festival, the Grand Prix at the Cinema du Réel in Paris, the Jury Prize at the Montreal World Film Festival, the Dutch Film Critics Award (twice!), and the J. Van Praag Award from The Humanist Association. In 2007, she was recipient of the Outstanding Achievement Award by the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. She was also a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 2013.
