Review: Forever

Peru-born, Netherlands-based documentarian Heddy Honigmann, a Polish-Jewish child of Holocaust survivors, is a sideways director: her documentaries come out of some sort of acute peripheral vision. Her 1999 “Crazy” illuminated the feelings of soldiers at war by inquiring of Dutch U.N. peacekeepers, what songs keep you from going out of your mind? Her 1992 “Metal And Melancholy” was a city symphony of Peruvians driven to become taxi drivers during an economic crisis. Even in lesser films, like the recent “Emoticons,” about young girls and their text and instant-messaging ways, or “P®ivé” (Thou shalt not steal), which contains her confessions of youthful shoplifting and interviews pickpockets and magicians, even elderly women who continue to steal, she’s elusively suggesting things beyond the ostensible topic. (The loneliness of abandoned older women resonates.) “Forever” is a tender reminder that funerals are for the living; cemeteries are for those who remember. Interviewing those who linger in Paris’ Pere Lachaise cemetery, visiting the graves of Maria Callas, Modigliani, Jim Morrison, Chopin, Simone Signoret, Honigmann captures what art infuses into the bloodstream of listeners, viewers, humans. 95m. 35mm. (Ray Pride) “Forever” opens Friday at Facets.