Metaal en melancholie

In Lima, the Peruvian metropolis with seven million inhabitants, the economy has been coming more and more to a dead end in the past ten years. A middle class hardly exists anymore: teachers, soldiers, doctors, and civil servants get salaries that do not amount to more than a few hundred guilders a month. Too little to get by for many people. Heddy Honigmann, who was born in Lima, returned to that city after almost twenty years and made METAL AND MELANCHOLY there. This documentary road movie has almost completely been shot from inside the romantically clapped out taxis that are driven by chauffeurs for whom this work has become their second life, their second job. A job that requires little more than a car, in whatever state, and a 'taxi' plate which is being sold for a guilder a piece on street corners. From the various colourful portraits of the cabdrivers, an image emerges of a society in which pride, adaptability, passion and the joy of living are contending for precedence.