"Forever" is a film about power and the vitality of art, about a place where love and death go hand in hand and beauty lives on: the Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Pere-Lachaise - one of the world's most famous cemeteries - is the final resting place for a gifted group of artists from various periods in history and virtually all corners of the world. Some, such as Piaf, Proust, Jim Morrison and Chopin, are still worshipped to this day. Others have fallen into oblivion, or are visited only
occasionally by a single admirer. In "Forever" we see the mysterious, calming and consoling beauty of this unique cemetery through the eyes of today's visitors.
At times a little pretentious, but a reasonable, not perfect, meditation on art and beauty and the relation of the living artist with the dead who have contributed to his art.
To be honest, a 90-minute documentary about a cemetery sounds about as exciting as spending 90 minutes in a cemetery. But surprisingly, Forever turns out to be a much-better film than that would suggest.
Without digging up a single rotting, worm-infested corpse or skeleton, Honigmann's lovely, elegant meditation nevertheless exposes haunting truths about Père-Lachaise and the visitors who fill it with such incongruous life and vivacity.
Netherlands-based filmmaker Heddy Honigmann uses the famed necropolis as a means of looking how artistic inspiration continues to live on long after the artist's death.
For anyone who has had the pleasure of walking through the Père Lachaise but struggled to elucidate its inexplicable appeal, Heddy Honigmann's documentary is enlightening without being demystifying.
Internationally revered documentarian Heddy Honigmann lends her voice to this heartbreakingly beautiful exposition on the enduring nature of art that takes place almost entirely in the famous Pere-Lachaise cemetery.
Every scene is memorable, including the opening one where director Heddy Honigmann sticks up her snooty Euro cosmopolitan nose at Americans in general and Jim Morrison in particular.
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