If the city of Lima was covered in dust, nobody would see it. It is not, really, but all the same hardly anybody sees it or thinks about it, about its people cheated century after century and neglected by its rulers. In order to come out of oblivion, there needs to be an earthquake grade 8 on the Richter scale or - as it has just happened - a discovery, in the most desolate mountains in Peru, of one of the largest mass graves in the history of the dirty war between the Peruvian army and the guerrilla movement Shining Path. In (El Olvido) Lima could be any other Latin American city. Terrible things hide under its soil or in its streets full of carbon monoxide, in its bars, schools, hospitals and neighborhoods; but the country is not a hot item.
Heddy Honigmann is considered one of world’s best documentary filmmakers. Her films (short & long fictions, short & long documentaries) have traveled all around the world receiving major awards and important retrospectives as in Toronto, the Museum of Modern Art in NY, Paris, Berlin, Minneapolis, Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Ontario, Utrecht, Grasz, Chicago and Berkeley between others.
She has also received many important awards for her entire work, as the Hot Docs Outstanding Achievement Award (2007), the San Francisco Films Society’s Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award (2007), the J. Van Praag Award from the Humanist Association (2005) Netherlands, the Jan Cassies award for her whole oeuvre from the Dutch National Fund for Cultural Films for Television (2003) Netherlands.