Dir: Vanessa Engle BBC
This landmark documentary chronicles all the women killed in Britain by their male partner or ex-partner in the course of one calendar year. In 2013, eighty-seven women died at the hands of men they had loved. This ambitious and important film tells the gripping and untold human stories behind this shocking yet faceless statistic, shedding light on a majorly important subject – the continuing and disproportionate violence visited by men on women every day. The film names all 87 women and tells the stories of some of them in detail.
“If this film felt more elegiac, more beautifully photographed with a richer palette than Engle’s earlier work, it was because she had chosen to make a beautiful monument to victims of domestic violence”
“Vanessa Engle is an excellent film-maker. She is intelligent and compassionate, but isn’t afraid to ask direct questions. It was compelling and moving on every level. The grief. The guilt. The pain. The thought, that a man could casually purchase a chain from B&Q and then go home and strangle his wife.”
“Documentary film-maker Vanessa Engle’s stock in trade is wry, witty and penetrating observation about the structures and institutions that support modern society and individual lives. But here she casts her exceptionally keen eye upon a much darker subject. They make for uncomfortable viewing, these everyday tales of stranglings, stabbings and worse, involving controlling, jealous, violent men, and women caught between love, their children and a fear of loneliness. But the matter-of-fact style of the telling makes this film all the more powerful”
“Expert documentary-maker Vanessa Engle’s latest film is a shocking, heart-rending piece. A plangent soundtrack and lingering shots of drab domestic scenes resonate and allow us time to absorb the ordinariness of the scenes where these terrible atrocities took place”
“As quizzical series like Lefties, Jews and Women have shown, Vanessa Engle is among our finest documentary makers, but this exceptional, often distressing new film might be her most starkly powerful. Poignant, hard and sometimes devastating”