Oblivion
July's Top 30 Films
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1h 32m
Directed by Heddy Honigmann • Documentary • 2008 • 93 minutes
The latest documentary from Heddy Honigmann (Forever, Metal and Melancholy, O Amor Natural) focuses on Peru's capital city of Lima.
OBLIVION provides intimate and moving portraits of street musicians, singers, vendors, shoeshine boys, and the gymnasts (some mere children) and jugglers who perform at traffic stops. The film also visits with small business owners, from a leather-goods repairman and a presidential sash manufacturer to a frog-juice vendor, and contrasts the work and home environments of bartenders, waiters and waitresses employed at Lima's finest restaurants and hotels but who live in slums in the city's surrounding hillsides.
The moving interviews and reminiscences of these resilient and resourceful Peruvians are interwoven with scenes of contemporary political protests and archival footage of the rogues' gallery of the nation's presidents—Fernando Belaunde (1980-1985), Alan Garcia (1985-1990), Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000)—whose mismanaged or corrupt regimes have turned the majority of Peru's citizens into perennial victims of economic impoverishment and political abuse.
"A masterpiece… you feel a direct, easygoing and warm approach from the director to her characters."—Dox Magazine
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