Dreamcatcher
Director and photo: Kim Longinotto
In a near-lynching night sky, as enchanting as it is unreliable, we hover together with overview images that descend on a glittering metropolis. Below are skyscrapers as God-given gifts and candles that look like glowing gold.
Then we are taken down the street level and hear a story from the place where people live (or try to live): A woman named Brenda Myers-Powell spent 25 years of her life as a prostitute. She was shot five times, stabbed at thirteen, and one day she was baptized by a man who then ripped the skin off her face and body.
This woman thought she had lost her face forever, and "all she wanted was to get her face back – and to become a woman, because she could never remember being a woman."
This is how the documentary starts Dreamcatcher (2015). Brenda stands in a classroom and tells this story about herself.
The brutal vandalism is reminiscent of what Mexican journalist Sergio Gonzáles Rodriguez reported in an essay published in the August issue of Le Monde diplomatique, "The taxi stops abruptly", an outraged testimony of a country riddled with corruption, torture and violence: The body of Julio César Fuentes Mondragón, one of the students who was kidnapped in Guerrero on September 26 last year, was found with his eyes torn out and his skin peeled off his face.
As Rodriguez writes in a reflection on the dehumanization of this violence, and hypothetically assuming the position of the perpetrator:
"I tear out your eyes so that you will not see me and what I do to you, and so that you will not be able to see yourself at your last moment or understand what I am coming to. . .
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