→ A Movies By Women.com Article
→ My Mother's Face
A daughter's camera confronts suspect in rape
by Philippa Bourke
Posted January 2005
New York (Sept. 8, 2004) -- Collapsing more than a decade of lost memories, evidence, justice and political upheaval like a row of dominoes, filmmaker Cathy Henkel went back to South Africa to try to find the man who 15 years before, "stole my mother's face."
When a 17-year-old stranger walked down her mother's suburban street in Orange Grove, Johannesburg in 1988 and asked if he could come in and use the bathroom and proceeded to knock her down, sexually assault her and to break up her face, he stole not merely the breezy countenance of early home reels, he pilfered the person.
Though Henkel has long since moved her mother to tranquil Australia, she has witnessed only an insidious decline. Three years spent in a psychiatric facility have been followed by withdrawal into a tiny flat. Her mother has become sedentary, depressed and obsessed with the attack and its incumbent injustices.
Without justice, Henkel resolves, there will be no getting over the rape.
In a last-ditch attempt to save her mother, she drops her life in 1993 and travels back with her camera to a razor-wired Johannesburg she instantly labels a "city of fear." What she discovers in the process is the unending trauma of rape, its capacity to unhinge a family, and its prevalence in the post-apartheid South Africa, where a new sexual offence's unit in Johannesburg would take on 1,800 unsolved cases and a woman is raped once every 26 seconds.
Henkel's mother is adamant she can identify her attacker in an old school photograph: on the night of the attack he let slip he was a student at the school she attended as a girl, which enabled a police officer at the time to go and retrieve a yearbook.
Henkel carries the photo like an amulet into a chaotic police department that can no longer locate the hard copy on the case. The prosecutor at the time declined to prosecute and Henkel, focused only on getting her mother out of the country, allowed the case to be closed.
A former investigating police officer is contacted by phone and, Henkel in earshot, recalls the suspect and interviewing him at the time. The boy admitted to being near the house and the boy's father threatened to sue him, the investigator recalls. But when he learns Henkel is back with her camera, his recollections fade and he decides to leave town.
Frustrated and out of time, Henkel returns to Australia. Her mother, meanwhile, has managed to get up from the sofa, into the car, and enroll herself in a philosophy course.
The following year, she returns to Johannesburg with the determination to find something positive in the "new (post-apartheid) South Africa" and in the quest for her mother's justice no matter what the outcome. What she ultimately embarks on is her own journey into rape, and its shocking universality, from the starting point of challenging surroundings and an open-wound family.
It is a country just waking up to crimes against women. This time a new sexual offences unit welcomes her and her camera and decides to re-open the case, assigning a tough-nut investigator -- who also wants to show off his everyday battleground. This is more like the South Africa of old, she reluctantly observes. The number of rapes committed now mirrors the racial profile of the country: 10 percent of rapes involve white women, the rest blacks. But there is no racial divider. White - and black men - commit rape.
The official investigation grinds to a halt. Henkel takes a detour and spends time with Charlene Smith, a well-known journalist, who is a rape survivor turned advocate, and with Glory, the mother of a pair of 2-year-old twins sodomized and raped by a man who know lives four blocks away. She talks with her brother and with her mother's neighbour, who discovered her after the attack standing on her doorstep naked, her face covered in blood.
The extent of rape in South Africa is horrific, Smith exclaims. One in two women will be raped, some three times in their lifetimes, she reports. Seventy-five percent of rape is gang rape. A practice called jack-rolling, where a group of men uses rape as a "punishment" to a woman who resists their verbal baits, is common.
Any woman who is raped faces an unbelievably traumatic fight, Smith explains. She must fight with everyone. She must fight with her own family.
In an exploration of the aftermath of rape, Henkel shows the how disbelief and blame of others can maim. Cecily, the neighbour and trusted friend, now tells the camera the reason for her disbelief was the fact that she knew the attacker and he was "such a nice boy," while Henkel's brother, an irritable, diffident father of teen girls he protects with a rifle, has for two decades decried his mother's ignorance and decision to let someone into the house late at night.
Hope Road, a jacaranda brushed street, was two days away from Christmas at the time of the attack and Henkel's mother had echoed her neighbour's sentiment to a tee. He seemed like such a nice boy.
In the words of Andre Neethling, head of the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences Unit in South Africa, "It's not just the ugly, funny-looking person that's going to rape. It could quite (easily)be a handsome person."
With camera in range, but turned off, Henkel carries out a three-hour argument with her brother, which ends in him telling his mother on film "I'm sorry." His daughters write postcards to a nana they have never seen. Healing, like the film, is in the making.
But whether or not the criminal investigation of Laura Henkel's attack has been assisted by the camera is uncertain. While Neethling welcomed the filming of his specialist crime unit, and it no doubt brought his attention to the lost case, the exercise may have slowed the case.
When Henkel hires a private investigator, fast information on the suspect's address, workplace and family sets the grounds for a gutsy confrontation that is filmed from the lapel of Henkel's jacket. The shift from documentarian to foot spy is jarring; its ease discomfiting. Yet Henkel's own unease with the role, is never avoided. In addition, she seeks out the advice of a human rights legal ethicist before making an anguished decision to confront.
Healing a form of Justice
With what turns out to be a legally weak foundation, the case of Laura Henkel's sexual assault will not stand up in a courtroom and Henkel must go back to Lismore, Queensland, to wait and see.
Her mother is shown reacting to the footage of the suspect. She is also shown at the end, speaking to her son on the phone, playing the piano, smiling and swimming laps in a black bathing costume that Cecily has sent.
"The motivating emotion for me," she said just after tying as winner of Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival this year, "was frustration and the fact that my mother was unable to fully recover from this and nothing I could do was helping to make it better. And the issue of justice kept coming up over and over again. That she didn't get justice.
"And so I thought I should face the issue of justice head-on. And I did get a form of justice for her. It's much more about my brother, who blamed my mother at the time of the incident, (who) apologizes to her.
That you see in the film. This very moving scene. You didn't get that he had, how much he'd affected her by asking her, Why did you let the guy in the house ? .... So the film is about other forms of healing and justice -- other than legal justice."
In some ways, Henkel's film is reminiscent of "Daughter from Danang" (2002) about an American woman who travels back to Vietnam to meet her birth mother for the first time, a documentary that doesn't turn the camera away at the heat of family confrontation and the ethical mindbender of how much Heidi owes a multi-generational family that expects her lifelong support. In "Daughter," healing is not necessarily guaranteed.
On the Henkel film's website there is the reminder from veteran commentator Phillip Adams that, "The thing about documentary films, as opposed to feature films, is that the stories they tell are not ones we necessarily want to hear."
PHOTO CREDITS:
Top Photo: Cathy Henkel in South Africa
Bottom Photo: Cathy Henkel/Awards night 2004 Tribeca Film Festival, New York
→ Go back to the rest of our articles.