Ray Pride

Peru-born, Netherlands-based documentarian Heddy Honigmann, a Polish-Jewish child of Holocaust survivors, is a sideways director: her documentaries come out of some sort of acute peripheral vision. Her 1999 "Crazy" illuminated the feelings of soldiers at war by inquiring of Dutch U.N. peacekeepers, what songs keep you from going out of your mind? Her 1992 "Metal And Melancholy" was a city symphony of Peruvians driven to become taxi drivers during an economic crisis. Even in lesser films, like the recent "Emoticons," about young girls and their text and instant-messaging ways, or "P®ivé" (Thou shalt not steal), which contains her confessions of youthful shoplifting and interviews pickpockets and magicians, even elderly women who continue to steal, she's elusively suggesting things beyond the ostensible topic. (The loneliness of abandoned older women resonates.) "Forever" is a tender reminder that funerals are for the living; cemeteries are for those who remember. Interviewing those who linger in Paris' Pere Lachaise cemetery, visiting the graves of Maria Callas, Modigliani, Jim Morrison, Chopin, Simone Signoret, Honigmann captures what art infuses into the bloodstream of listeners, viewers, humans. 95m. 35mm. (Ray Pride)

"Forever" opens Friday at Facets.

(2008-07-01)

Also by Ray Pride

An Inconvenient Cartoon
A plush cousin to "Idiocracy," the latest humbling eyeful from Pixar, "Wall-E," says that Americans are going to die for their consumption habits, except for a few fat fumblers shot out into space
(2008-06-24)

Bourne Again
Opening with the familiar Universal logo that has sparkling space dust girdling the globe, we're quickly thrown into a comic-book adaptation written by Scots by a Kazakh director who made his name in Russia, set in a lustrously shot Chicago, with a Scottish male lead and an American female. We're quickly propelled into a loonily labyrinthine, gratifyingly Byzantine weave of immaculately produced visual filmmaking
(2008-06-24)

Tip of the Week
Winnipeg! Home of ice, snow and Guy Maddin! Winnipeg! Sleepwalking capitol of the world, where you're allowed to keep the keys to past apartments and current tenants are obligated to keep you safe until you wake if you sleepwalk in at all hours of the night! Winnipeg! Where gay bison demolished Happyland amusement park! Winnipeg! Maddin's latest, perhaps his masterpiece!
(2008-06-24)

Tip of the Week
What lies beneath "Up The Yangtze" is a true depth charge. A longitudinal documentary of surface calm, it's a smashing debut for young Canadian-Chinese director Yang Chung
(2008-06-17)

Love and Death Head-On
(2008-06-10)

Tip of the Week
(2008-06-10)

All the Little Things
(2008-06-03)

Tip of the Week
(2008-06-03)

Tip of the Week
(2008-05-27)

Dog Days
(2008-05-20)

Tip of the Week
(2008-05-20)

Image That
(2008-05-20)

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