METAL AND MELANCHOLY
dir. Heddy Honigmann, 1982
Peru/The Netherlands, 80 min
In Spanish w/ English subtitles

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 2 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8 – 10 PM
MONDAY, DECEMBER 19 – 7:30 PM

“I once read that a famous Spanish poet said that Peru was made of metal and melancholy. He was right, perhaps because pain and poverty have made us hard as the hardest of our metals, and melancholy because we are also tender and we long for better times that were lost in oblivion. “

This documentary is an offbeat “road movie” in which acclaimed documentarian Heddy Honigmann travels with, and thereby discovers the stories of, taxi drivers in Lima. In the early 1990s, in response to Peru’s inflationary economy and a government destabilized by corruption and Shining Path terrorism, many middle-class professionals used their own cars to moonlight as taxi drivers in order to weather the financial crisis.

METAL AND MELANCHOLY learns how these part-time cabbies, including a teacher, a Ministry of Justice employee, a film actor, and a policeman, among others, manage to navigate through Lima’s congested, pothole-filled streets in dilapidated cars whose survival techniques are as fascinating as those of their owners.

“Offers a candid and kaleidoscopic view of the poverty-stricken metropolis through each driver-philosopher’s tale of hardship. Some of the stories are disarmingly amusing, even comical; others are poignant and sobering.” – Ted Shen, Chicago Reader