Private, October 24

(Privé). Heddy Honigmann is a thief. She confesses as much in a wry and forthright voiceover: though her days of youthful shoplifting are behind her, as a filmmaker, she says, "I steal images from reality." All kinds of theft, from the petty to the metaphysical, are investigated in this gently probing film, made for Dutch public television as part of a documentary series on the Ten Commandments. In a deft collage of interviews, Honigmann explores the thrill of desire and the devastation of loss, showing as much fascination and empathy with pickpockets and con artists as with the victims of crime: a survivor of multiple muggings, robbed of the freedom to walk alone at night; an Argentinean woman whose family was taken by state terror; an aging farmer whose fundamentalist father left him missing a sister, a childhood, even the power of speech.

—Juliet Clark

• Photographed by Gregor Meerman. (50 mins, In Dutch with English subtitles, Color, Beta, From Ideale Audience)

Followed by:

GOOD HUSBAND, DEAR SON
Heddy Honigmann (The Netherlands, 2001)

(Goede man, lieve zoon). Life proceeds at a gentle pace in Ahatovici, a picturesque village in the green hills outside Sarajevo. But Ahatovici was far from quiet in 1992, when the Chetniks rounded up and murdered 80 percent of the men. Not a single house escaped the curse of death. Ten years later, the women carry on with the chores and rituals of the day-to-day, still weighted with grief. Honigmann respectfully invites several widows to describe their beloved through the most basic yet profound touchstones. The dead men live on in pictures, of course, but also in their clothes and tools, and especially in the walls they plastered and the doorposts they built. They come to life through the heartbreaking words of their women. Ignoring the temptation to make a political or even an antiwar statement, Honigmann nobly chooses to humanize, eulogize, and (given the nature of film) immortalize Refik, Eldin, Sead, and the other victims.—Michael Fox, S.F. Int'l Film Festival 2002

Written by Honigmann, Ester Gould, Emir Dzino. Photographed by John Appel. (50 mins, In Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles, Color, Beta, From Ideale Audience)

(Total running time: 100 mins)