Movies for Survivors:

Someone on a survivor's list recommended Passions of the Mind with Demi Moore.

Now that I've seen it, I know why.

It has a wonderful "illustration" important to survivors' recovery.

If you haven't seen it, rent it or watch for it.

Cheryl

08/18/2001

Daily Breeze

Things Behind the Sun

9pm Showtime Pacific Time

Rape film personal for director Anders

paraphrased:

Clutching a bottle, actress Kim Dickens kicks over a garbage can and rages at unseen demons.

The opening scene of the Showtime movie depicts her charager returning to the home where, years before as a 13yo girl she was gang-raped.

Five years ago, filmmaker Allison Anders made a similar, more sober journey to the very same home in Cape Canaveral, FL

Her friends urger her to stay away. But even after years of therapy and substance abuse, Anders never felt she had put her rape by three brothers in 1968 behind her.

"I knew it was going to be very difficult but my purpose was just to deal with stuff head-on," Anders said, "Even during the time I was there, I started to think of a movie, because it was so instantaneous, the relief that I got from being there."

The movie blends fiction with Ander's own experience. Along with filming the scene where Dickens' character is raped in the same home, the same song plays in the background during the assault -- the Left Banke's "Pretty Ballerina"

Anders scknowledged that reliving the rape with such specificity was scary, but with young actors I had to understand what they were going thru.

Dickens plays singer-songwriter Sherry, who's making a minor splash with a song about rape while living a self-destrictive life of booze and unfeeling sex, frustrating the manager who loves her. The little-known actress who resembles a young Lucinda Williams, shines in a role considered by Winona Ryder, Heather Graham, Angelina Jolie, Cameron Diaz and Ashley Judd.

Actor Gabriel Mann plays Owen, a writer sent from LA to interview her after telling his editor he knows who raped Sherry. It's slowly revealed how well he knows the rapists and how unresolved feelings from the incident have caused him problems.

Anders wanted to explore rape from several different angles, including a male point of view, largely because she and some friends who were rape victims were curious.

"We each wondered if the perpetrators ever had to suffer in any way, and I don't mean legally," she said. "were they having relationships that were normal? Were they suffering emotionally in any way? Were they feeling bad? Did they have shame? None of us could quite believe that they got off scot-free."

The fictional rape's ringleader clearly feels no remorse for what he did.

The movie is the first Anders film to debut on television instead of in theaters.

Wow. I saw the movie.

Great well-made intriguing movie. Definitely rated R for sex and nudity. NOT a movie for the fainthearted. Usually these movies don't move me to deep tears. This one does. It wasn't so much the rape scenes, as the "on the way to recovery" scenes.

Cheryl

Cheryl