Metal and melancholy

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Movie
German title Metal and melancholy
Original title Metal y Melancolía,
Metaal en Melancholie
Country of production Netherlands , Peru
original language Spanish
Publishing year 1994
length 81 minutes
Rod
Director Heddy Honigmann
script Heddy Honigmann,
Peter Delpeut
production Gustavo Sánchez,
Suzanne van Voorst
camera Carlos Muñiz,
Stef Tijdink
cut Noemí Baeza,
Jan Hendriks
occupation
  • Mario de la Vega
  • Adelina Rojas
  • Victor Talledo
  • Mercedes Aguilar
  • as well as other taxi drivers from Lima

Metal and Melancholy is a 1994 documentary directed by Heddy Honigmann . The film is a Dutch - Peruvian co-production. The Peruvian film director Francisco J. Lombardi was involved in the making of the film. In Germany it was broadcast for the first time on September 19, 1994 on WDR television.

content

The director, a Peruvian living in the Netherlands, accompanies taxi drivers in the Peruvian capital Lima with their cameras. At the time the film was made, Peru was in a serious crisis. Hyperinflation and a neoliberal economic program subsequently decreed by the autocratic ruling President Fujimori have plunged large sections of society into poverty, plus the consequences of ten years of war against the terrorist underground Maoist organization “ Sendero Luminoso ”. For many Peruvians, declaring their own car, often a VW Beetle (called “cucaracha” - “cockroach”) to be a taxi, is the only way to stay afloat: taxi signs to stick on the windshield are used by children, who trade on the street, sold for a sol (Peruvian currency). The director films a boy of about twelve who proudly introduces himself as a “businessman”. During a taxi ride, the radio read the news that the leader of the Sendero Luminoso, Guzman , was sentenced to life imprisonment.

The taxi drivers tell the director about their lives and their cars. The desolate technical condition of many cars (broken door hinges and gear levers, leaks in the cooling system) protects them from theft. Almost all of them had or have other jobs: drug salesmen, salespeople, department heads in a ministry, etc. A driver has a daughter who needs expensive special medical treatment, a driver has separated from her husband and lives with her father, who makes her living as a single person Mother not accepted. Another driver comes from a village in the Andes, where often only two or three of eight children in a family survive. The friend of a driver was shot dead by the "Sendero Luminoso", another was previously employed as a secret police officer to monitor students and is glad that he has lost this job. A driver was in love with an Italian tourist but didn't want to leave Peru. A former actor quotes a Spanish writer: "Peru is metal and melancholy".

He describes his country like this: "Pain and poverty have made us hard like metal, but we are also soft and mourn the good old days."

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