Heddy Honigmann’s documentary focuses on the travels and stories of taxi drivers in Lima, Peru in the early 1990’s. Following an economic collapse, many middle-class professionals have taken to using their own cars and moonlighting as taxi-drivers at night. As the drivers, who include a teacher, a policeman and a film actor amongst others, steer through Lima’s decaying streets, they reveal their relationship with their cars, their country and their families.

Honigmann is an esteemed documentarian who claims never to do interviews, “just conversations”. Metal and Melancholy sees her return to the town and people of her birthplace. She left Lima in 1978 because their was no film school in the country and learned her craft in Rome going on to produce documentaries that have been recognized all over the world, most recently 2008’s El Olvido.