Deanna Walters shares her harrowing story in Cynthia Hill’s gripping PRIVATE VIOLENCE
PRIVATE VIOLENCE (Cynthia Hill, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Friday, June 13, 7:00
Festival runs June 12-22
212-875-5601
www.privateviolence.com
www.ff.hrw.org
More than thirty years after Faith McNulty’s book The Burning Bed, which was adapted into a powerful and influential 1984 film starring Farrah Fawcett, Private Violence shows that there is still a long way to go in dealing with the very real issue of battered women. In the moving, emotional documentary, director-producer Cynthia Hill tells the story of Deanna Walters, an abused North Carolina housewife working with advocates Kit Gruelle and Stacy Cox to try to put Deanna’s dangerous and abusive husband behind bars so she can have a life with her young daughter. It’s horrifying to see photos of Deanna’s severely beaten face and body, then hear that law enforcement agencies and the legal system still often regard such cases as minor domestic disputes that do not require arrests and imprisonment. At the center of the controversy is the prevailing attitude that it is somehow the woman’s fault for not simply leaving her abusive partner, instead returning again and again for more physical and psychological torture, a premise that is proved wrong in many ways. Hill (The Guest Worker, Tobacco Money Feeds My Family) concentrates on the main narrative, not talking heads and statistics, following the developments procedurally, while more is revealed about Kit as well, who suffered her own torment at the hands of an abusive husband.
Victim advocate Kit Gruelle fights the system to help battered women gain justice in North Carolina
Sharply shot by photojournalist and cinematographer Rex Miller (Behind These Walls, Hill’s PBS food series A Chef’s Life), the award-winning film opens with a gripping six-minute scene that brings viewers right into the middle of a harrowing situation. “I sometimes refer to restraining orders as a last will and testament because battered women are the experts in what’s happening in their relationship, and we need — society — we need to treat them like the experts that they are,” Kit says shortly thereafter in a radio interview. “When she says, ‘He is going to kill me,’ or ‘He’s going to kill my family,’ or ‘He’s going to kill my cousin if he can’t get to me,’ we have got to step on the brakes and slow down and take that whole thing seriously.” A presentation of HBO Documentary Films, Private Violence is having its New York premiere June 13 at the Walter Reade Theater in the “Women’s Rights and Children’s Rights” section of the 2014 Human Rights Watch Film Festival and will be followed by a panel discussion with Hill, Gruelle, Walters, and executive producer Gloria Steinem, moderated by Liesl Gerntholtz. The twenty-second HRWFF runs June 12-22 at Lincoln Center, the IFC Center, and the Times Center and comprises twenty-two films that explore such other themes as “LGBT Rights,” “Human Rights Defenders, Icons, and Villains,” “Armed Conflict and the Arab Spring,” and “Migrants’ Rights” through such works as Khalo Matabane’s Nelson Mandela: The Myth and Me, Jennifer Kroot’s To Be Takei, Sara Ishaq’s The Mulberry House, and Mano Khalil’s The Beekeeper.
In 1965, Polish-French auteur Roman Polanski followed his Oscar-nominated debut feature, Knife in the Water, with his first English-language film, the psychological masterpiece Repulsion. Catherine Deneuve gives a mesmerizing performance as Carol Ledoux, a deeply troubled, beautiful young woman who shies away from the world, hiding something that has turned her into a frightened childlike creature who barely speaks. A manicurist who lives in London with her sister, Hélène (Yvonne Furneaux), Carol becomes entranced by cracks in the sidewalk, suddenly going nearly catatonic at their sight; in bed at night, she is terrified of the walls, which seem to break apart as she grips tight to the covers. A proper gentleman (John Fraser) is trying to start a relationship with her, but she ignores him or forgets about their meetings, unable to make any genuine connections. Deneuve’s every movement, from the blink of an eye to a wave of her hand, reveals Carol’s submerged inner turmoil and desperation, leading to an ending that is both shocking and not surprising. Shot in a creepy black-and-white by Gilbert Taylor (A Hard Day’s Night, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) and featuring a pulsating score by jazz legend Chico Hamilton, Repulsion is a brilliant journey into the limitations and possibilities of the human mind, with Polanski expertly navigating through a complex terrain. Winner of a pair of awards at the fifteenth Berlin International Film Festival, Repulsion, the first of Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy (followed by 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby and 1976’s The Tenant), is being shown in a 35mm print June 13-16 as part of the IFC Center series “The Fearless Roman Polanski,” which runs June 13-19 and also includes such diverse films by the immensely talented, controversial director as Chinatown, The Fearless Vampire Killers, Knife in the Water, Macbeth, Tess, Cul-De-Sac, Oliver Twist, The Pianist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant, and the rarely screened Weekend of a Champion, leading up to the June 20 theatrical release of his latest masterwork, 
No mere homage to ’80s films, Michael Tully’s sweetly charming Ping Pong Summer was made as if it were a teen bully movie from the decade that gave us such Reagan-era flicks as The Karate Kid, Back to the Future, My Bodyguard, Revenge of the Nerds, and Three O’Clock High. Shot in Super 16mm by cinematographer Wyatt Garfield to give it an authentic period look, Ping Pong Summer is set in Ocean City, Maryland, in 1985, where the Miracle family spends its annual summer vacation. This year they are staying in a ramshackle house by the bay instead of the ocean to save money, but shy, awkward thirteen-year-old supernerd Radford “Rad” Miracle (Marcello Conte) doesn’t really care; all he wants to do is play table tennis and listen to hip-hop. Rad and fellow geek Teduardo “Teddy” Fryy (Myles Massey) hang out at Fun Hub, where kids play air hockey, arcade games like Pac-Man, and Ping-Pong, which, it turns out, Rad is not very good at, his skills about as adept as Teddy’s lame rapping. But after being bullied once too often by obnoxious rich kid and local Ping-Pong god Lyle Ace (Joseph McCaughtry) and his sycophantic right-hand man, Dale Lyons (Andy Riddle), Rad challenges Lyle to a match, which he immediately regrets. But with the help of local weirdo Randi Jammer (real-life Ping-Pong enthusiast Susan Sarandon, cofounder of the