Back to homepage

The Man Who Stole My Mother´s Face

The Man Who Stole My Mother´s Face

(The Man Who Stole My Mother´s Face), Cathy Henkel / JAR - AUS, 2003
74 min

The number of sexually motivated crimes belongs world-wide among one of the fastest growing types of crime while at the same time remaining the most hidden. Few women report this crime to the police. South Africa has an especially unflattering record in this area. And it was here, in the capital Johannesburg, where two days before Christmas in 1988 Laura Henkel, a middle-aged woman, met a young man in front of her house. Not suspecting anything, she let him into her house, where this secondary school student brutally raped her and caused serious injury to her face. However, the worst injury was to her soul, which dragged her down into ever decreasing depression. This was exacerbated by the fact that after Laura identified the perpetrator, the police suspended the case. Her daughter, Australian documentary filmmaker Cathy Henkel, decided to help her mother find justice and set off on an exhaustive examination of the police investigation. After some time she is able to find the actual perpetrator and dig deeper into the roots of sexual violence in South Africa. Thanks to the results of the formally suspenseful and very personal search, her mother begins to slowly recover from the endured trauma.