Everybody knows the power of music in our memories. Music is even more powerful when it's connected -as in Dame la mano- with the land where you were born. The films follows in a nice way a group of Cuban exiles living in NY and NJ. Some are musicians, others dancers, other just common exiles. All of them work hard to survive in the USA. They are attached in a ambivalent way to the country which has given them a shelter. All of the characters in the film attend each Sunday evening a place where the real Afro-Cuban rumba is performed. The place is called "Esquina Habanera" in NJ. When at the end of the film you see them all together in Esquina Habanera, you realize during the beautifully almost 30 minutes of music and dance, that those exiles are a family, united by the rumba. The award as Best Musical Film at the Tiburon International Film Festival in the USA, was very well deserved.
Reviews
3 Reviews
Good Husband, Dear Son
(2002)
A powerful film about the effects of war in a community
14 August 2007
The only drop of blood you see in "Good husband, dear son" is on the photograph of a young boy killed during an unknown genocide in 1992 in a little town in Bosnia, Ahatovici. His mother keeps the photograph, the only thing she has from him. The way the story of this genocide is told by Heddy Honigmann is absolutely touching and very original. There is no archive material, no detailed narration of the genocide and no boring journalistic information in this documentary. There are objects (working tools, photographs, a T-shirt, a watch, an apple tree...) which tell the story, objects cherished by the widows who lost their good husbands and dear sons. The memories these objects carry, told by these incredible strong women, make almost those boys and men alive. I never have seen a film which shows the spectator, with great poetry and delicacy and in such a profound way, the horror of what a war is and the emptiness and destruction a war lefts behind. The hole structure of a community is destroyed. The nice postman is death, the guitar-player who made the girls dance, the helpful man who brought the water to the little town, the football players, the man who loved to give advise to the ones who needed it... they are all gone and we also long for them. Great that the Sundance Channel showed "Good husband, dear son", a documentary of enormous quality.
Forever
(II) (2006)
Love & Death, hand in hand in a beautiful film
14 August 2007
That it is possible to find so much signs of life in a cemetery is something striking in the carefully composed film of Heddy Honigmann. And so much consolation in beauty is also something I'll never forget from seeing the film. Beauty in the form of art, but also in the form of mementos left for the beloved death ones. Human voices telling stories are in this film sometimes as beautiful as a piece of music by Chopin!! Most of the characters in the film are very special and at the same time you feel a connection with almost all of them, as if they were your friends telling you a personal story while you're sitting with them in a park. Forever should be in the cinema for a long time, as long as all my friends can see it, and as long as they can tell their friends to see it and so on and so on...
Tell Your Friends