OVID.tv Presents FOREVER Review — Life is Art

Posted on by Pritesh Patel

Shot in Père-Lachaise, this old romantic graveyard stops tourists, art admirers, loved ones, and aspiring musicians…

Here they meet Jim Morrison, Frederick Chopin, Marcel Proust, Maria Callas, and others. Crows caw as devotees water the flowers. At a moment, our gaze contemplates the solemn weeping statue of an angel. Next, we meet a young girl, Yoshino Kimura, debuting Chopin as a concert pianist. Her father loved Chopin– she shares. Tears well in her eyes as she pours out her heart at the news of his recent death. We are whisked away to the image of a small pale rose against monumental stone slabs. Birds are twittering amidst the sound of laughter. We then see a million lipstick kisses on Oscar Wilde’s tombstone.

A gaggle of old ladies sits on a shaded bench. Light hits their faces reflected from the stone cemetery in front of them. Behind, trees gently sway as leaves jingle under twilight. The camera uncomfortably zooms in on the face of a particular older woman.

She talks about her husband - how they moved from Spain when they saw a priest execute prisoners with a pistol. “That’s why I don’t believe in God. Because if a priest can kill, it proves there’s nothing. Then there is no God.”

 

 

A woman stands by her father’s grave, smiling into the camera.

Her gray hair blends with the Armenian Cross, the khatchkar tombstone in the background. Crows caw. The sound of soap and water gently scrapes against the cemented rectangular headstone laying beside her.

 

The haunting melody of Le Temps des cerises chants over the photos of Holocaust victims, as the camera slowly hovers over their graves.

The camera does not focus on the chiseled stone, but on red roses and yellow daffodils recently watered and blowing in the wind.

OVID.tv’s FOREVER Reminds that Art is Eternal

An embalmer hunches in front of Modigliani’s grave, his visage reminding of the way the artist painted faces to his work…

 

A white-haired woman burdened by a backpack of mysterious proportions buzzes around numerous artists with an almost intimate knowledge of the lives they used to lead…

A man with fire in his eyes honors Proust’s grave explaining that his entire life was changed by reading La Recherche…

As filmmaker Heddy Honigmann hovers over Maria Callas’s grave, the screen flashes back in time to Callas performance of Casta Diva in Palais Garnier, December of 1958. Her head peaks through the veil of her time. Her voice rings out from a beyond era like an angel. Immersed in this archival aria, we almost forget she is buried under perfected granite where the filmmaker’s tripod now stands.

With the melancholia of a moss-covered tomb, Honigmann's FOREVER ponders the nature of art in the twilight, between life and death. In this writer's opinion, you'll receive more questions than answers thinking about it. 

If you've lost a loved one recently, love art, or are an aspiring creator give this film a watch.

 

CREATIVE TEAM

Director: HEDDY HONIGMANN

Producer: CARMEN COBOS

Writers: JUDITH VREICKS, HEDDY HONIGMANN, ESTER GOULD

Editor: DANNIEL DANNIEL

Cinematography: ROBERT ALAZRAKI

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For more information and tickets visit OVID.tv's https://www.ovid.tv/videos/forever.

Photos Courtesy of OVID.tv

Pritesh Patel
Pritesh Patel

About the Author: Pritesh Patel

Raised in California’s Inland Empire, Pritesh became a lover of classic books and impressionist music. These opened windows to life outside suburbia -- the surreal and the sublime quickly became a staple of his loved art. Over Aslan waters, fourteen-year-old Pritesh jumped from voyaging the Dawn Treader onto London’s Ghost, and later deep underground above Verne’s electric sea. Today, Pritesh spends a lot of time ruminating on how harmonic, unconventional, and sometimes even jarring music interacts with literature and film. He is interested in how different cultures react with one another, particularly with Indian music, film, and books.

When he’s not painting, Pritesh is running long distances, and stretching his imagination far and wide under leafed arcs and shadows. At the end of the day, you might find him unwinding his clarinet to play some jazzy tunes, reading with his cat, or enjoying a good cup of ginger tea.

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