Although the award-winning Trini-made documentary, Breaking the Cycle is a year-old, it seems with its profound message it's still making its rounds.
The 61-minute-long feature on domestic violence, based on the true story of a clinical therapist, 43-year-old Camika Mc Letchie was recently screened at the Montreal Black Film Festival in Canada, which began in on September 24, 2019, and concluded on September 29, 2019.
The board of the Montreal Black Film Festival selected the film submitted by its Spanish-born director Miquel Galofré. In an interview with the Sunday Guardian, Mc Letchie, 44, said the screening was well attended by women who found it to be not only inspiring but also motivating and much of its content moved the audience to tears, reactions similar to when it premiered at MovieTowne on September 24, 2018.
"After the screening, I learned from women in the audience that domestic violence was very prevalent in Montreal and Canada as a whole," Mc Letchie revealed.
According to www.150.statcan.gc.ca, one-third ((95,704) of all police-reported violence in Canada involves intimate partners.
The finding, which came out of a 2017 survey done on family violence in Canada, also revealed, as, in previous years, females represented a greater majority—almost eight in ten victims.
It said, "72 per cent of intimate partner violence victims experienced physical force without a weapon, while six per cent were threatened with death or injury." Knives, (31 per cent) were said to be the most common weapon used.
The blunt film peered into the life of Mc Letchie who suffered abuse for 14 years of her marriage at the hand of her former husband. In it, she spoke graphically of the physical, emotional and psychological abuse both her and her seven children experienced. But the wounds of that action were not the only topic of conversation. The moving story of her non-existent relationship with her estranged father, who in the documentary, in a phone call denied her as his own, was heart-wrenching to say the least and relatable to most women, who spoke after the screening of documentary, how not having their fathers in their lives also negatively affected them and the choices they made in choosing a partner.
Although Breaking the Cycle did not win its nomination for best full-length documentary at the Montreal Black Film Festival, Mc Letchie said just to be nominated along with the more recognised films from the US and other first world countries, was a great achievement for a small Caribbean film. Since its release in 2018, the film has been screened at several film festivals across the globe, including in the US, Spain, Guatemala and even winning the Jury Special Mention Award in Croatia, where it was screened in 2018 at the Vox Feminae Film Festival.
