Heddy Honigmann is an international treasure, a cinema master who belongs in the contemporary canon of great filmmakers. But maybe its, still, a boy’s club…except in documentary.
Immediately after receiving the Hot Docs Outstanding Achievement Award in 2007 Heddy flew to Peru. She told me she was shooting a new film there, in Lima, formerly her home town. It, OBLIVION, is another wonder. She remains the best listener in the world, and her subjects never seem to notice that there’s a camera in the room. Or maybe its that Heddy brings us into these spaces. Here its often bars, cafe’s, shops, the streets of Lima…other times its been living rooms, beaches, cemeteries. As in her best work, there’s intimacy, warmth, humour, candour. She’s also doing some new things with the editing and structure within individual scenes. I will see it again, hopefully on a big screen. Sitting in a video booth watching major works blur by is not exactly condusive to the kind of attention and reflection such films deserve and require.
I’ll screen in the market for four hours today, and as always will jot notes on 4×6 inch index cards. I have ten years of these cards in my home office. I capture quick initial impressions, content reminders, and subjective remarks. Most of the time I use one card, front and back, for each film. In the case of OBLIVION card above, the back has most of my subjective thoughts (“deeply human,” “sublime” “an engaging people’s history” are some of musings on this particular card). I try to clear my head with each blank card as I press play. I ask Hot Docs programmers to be open and generous to each film, and follow my own advice. Yet I admit some (many?) of the cards have thoughts which aren’t so generous. The volume of work we see is overwhelming, and most often comes in very concentrated spurts, at the festivals we visit, and then during the intensive ten week process which ultimately yields the Festival programme.
The rhythm at Leipzig stays the same as Jihlava: screening during the day, a dinner and then a party. At dinner I’m sitting with some new friends, all of us Jihlava refugees, still a little worn from the previous five days and happy to be each other’s lazy company. The after party is in a cavernous, stunning former fortress where I chat with Simon Ho (Guangzhou Int. Doc. Film Festival); Dana Wilson, a Canadian ex-pat photographer living in Prague and here to pitch a documentary; Gabriela Bussman (Visions Du Reel)…and many others.