I love going to cemeteries. There’s something majestic, something foolhardy, something particular vain about the human condition that gets represented in them. It’s an attempt to reverse the mutability of life with an ever-lasting monument. I’ve never been to Père-Lachaise, but when I go to Paris one day, this cemetery will be one of the first places I go to. Dutch documentary maker Heddy Honigmann seems to share similar views about cemeteries, and wanders Père-Lachaise capturing moments of life and transcendence. It’s a beautiful work that aims to show that by looking at death, we can also find traces of life.

Père-Lachaise houses many of the world’s greatest artists – Chopin, Modigliani and Proust for example – but is also rich in history too (many of the Communards were executed in the cemetery in 1871 following their uprising). Honigmann wanders around the cemetery and finds people making pilgrimages to particular graves. She then interviews these people, occasionally following them home. There’s the concert pianist who visits Chopin’s grave, because Chopin reminds her of her recently deceased father. There’s the man who hated Proust initially, but after reading it at the insistence of an ex-wife, discovered a deep love and decided to turn In Search of Lost Time into graphic novels. There’s the embalmer who uses Modigliani to inspire him to do his work.

The last story in fact captures the cyclical nature of the film, and of life. Modigliani’s death and his art helped inspire the life in someone else, who then uses his art to capture someone else’s death. If anything, it’s about the transcendence of art – art itself is the everlasting monument of these people’s lives, not the grave itself. Their art is the thing that will outlive them, whether it’s a painting, a book, a film or a song (poignantly highlighted by the tale of a young singer-songwriter who died of cancer before she could make a proper name of herself – her song on the film’s soundtrack acts as a way to preserve her memory).

However, Honigmann doesn’t only focus on the great artistic figures. She looks at people who visit their loved ones, deceased spouses or parents. In this way, she also suggests love is a way of transcending death. These stories in particularly are very poignant. There’s a Proustian feel in the way her subjects’ stories are triggered via seemingly arbitrary moments in the film – particularly their emotions and their memories. Ultimately Forever works as a moving tribute to life, to art and to love, all simply told via looking at death.—David Levinson