"Honigmann is one of the most brilliant documentarians working today."—Karen Cooper, Director, Film Forum, New York
"Heddy is simply one of the contemporary masters of the form... [She has] the consistent and uncanny ability to capture moments of profound emotional honesty."—Sean Farnel, Director of Programming, Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival
Heddy Honigmann (1951-2022), a child of Holocaust survivors, was born in Lima, Peru, where she studied biology and literature at the University of Lima. She left Peru in 1973, traveled throughout Mexico, Israel, Spain and France, and later studied film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. Since 1978 she has been a Dutch citizen and presently lives in Amsterdam, although her filmmaking career has taken her around the world.
As the child of exiles, it's not surprising that the plight of exiles and outsiders is a recurrent theme in her documentaries, as is memory, music and love. Her subjects have included cab drivers in Peru, immigrant musicians on the Paris Metro, senior citizens in Brazil, and Cuban exiles in New Jersey.
In addition to the elegantly composed imagery of her films, Honigmann's most often recognized talent as a documentary filmmaker is her ability to make an emotional connection with the people she films, an empathetic ability to listen and to elicit surprisingly intimate responses from them. As Honigmann has described her approach, "I don't do interviews. I make conversation."