In this offbeat “road movie,” acclaimed documentarian Heddy Honigmann travels with, and thereby discovers the stories of, taxi drivers in Lima. In the early 1990s, in response to Peru’s inflationary economy and a government destabilized by corruption and Shining Path terrorism, many middle-class professionals used their own cars to moonlight as taxi drivers in order to weather the financial crisis.

Through the filmmaker’s distinctive approach—”I don’t do interviews,” Honigmann has explained, “I have conversations”—METAL AND MELANCHOLY learns how these part-time cabbies, including a teacher, a Ministry of Justice employee, a film actor, and a policeman, among others, manage to navigate through Lima’s congested, pothole-filled streets in dilapidated cars whose survival techniques are as fascinating as those of their owners.

After describing the intimate relationships they’ve developed with their vehicles, and the ingenious methods they use to thwart car thieves, the taxi drivers open up emotionally to relate heartfelt accounts of domestic adversity, love, life-threatening illness, romance, economically frustrated ambition, pain and suffering. “Life is hard, but beautiful,” one of the drivers sums up philosophically.

METAL AND MELANCHOLY also occasionally steps outside the taxis for a heartrending visit to a Lima cemetery, to visit the homes of their drivers and to meet their families, to contend with the swarms of street vendors, including young children, and to snap personal portraits of cars and drivers.

“Unbelievably magical. This is my first encounter with Heddy Honigmann. I’ve heard her interviews were the best, and this film delivers. You think it’s a documentary about cabbie’s and their endless stories, but it’s so much more. It’s poetic, allegorical. It’s lyrical, as most of the Peruvians on films are incredibly eloquent, revealing just as great an ease in taking you through their personal history as traversing Lima’s chaos, Lima’s body. These cabbies are mitochondrial, their reactions to time, space, and memory keeping the blood of Peru flowing, a deeper energy” – RJ Lozada, letterboxd