Press RoomIn the News
INTO THE LIGHT
Marc Cabrera
September 21, 2008
Boyhood Shadows" is a gut-wrenching exploration into an almost impossible-to-cover documentary subject: adult male victims of childhood molestation and sexual abuse. The subject matter is so challenging that its filmmakers, local veterans Terri DeBono and Steve Rosen of Mac + Ava Motion Pictures, initially balked at the idea. Teaming with the Monterey County Rape Crisis Center and its adult male sexual abuse support group - one of the few of its kind in California - DeBono and Rosen present portraits of survivors struggling to heal day-to-day. None is more poignant than Glenn Kulik, a Los Angeles survivor who provides the story arc for the film through his intense, open-book study of heartbreak and redemption.
The film debuts at 7 p.m. Monday during a special reception at the Monterey Conference Center, Steinbeck Forum, in Monterey. The event is open to the public. The filmmakers and others involved with the project will be on hand for the event.
The project started out simple enough: The center wanted to produce a public service announcement touting the support group, with members drafting the concept for the 30-second television spot and DeBono and Rosen enlisted to direct.
Once completed, executive director Clare Mounteer decided it was time to up the ante and produce a more rounded, in-depth feature on both the support group and the issue of male sex abuse victims, many of whom live in silence for years and sometimes decades at a time.
"We knew if we did this, we wanted to do it in such a way to get the message out there that, No. 1, this happens to men," said Mounteer. "It happens to boys and this is a population that is largely ignored."
DeBono and Rosen had concerns initially, the first being who would want to watch something like this.
"It's such an explosive subject that no one, including me, wanted to get involved in," said DeBono, speaking in the pair's Monterey office. "It's such a huge problem, one you wouldn't understand how you could make it so people want to watch this."
"What we tried to do was understand it," said Rosen. "We wanted to understand it (for ourselves)."
They started with the statistics, the most jarring being that 1 in 6 boys is sexually molested by the age of 16. Also, 60 percent of sexual assaults go unreported.
That latter stat is important because it speaks to the silent suffering of victims. It's what drives the story of Kulik, 48, a survivor of sexual abuse that began at age 10.
Kulik's survival came at a price, namely the devastation of his close-knit family.
The film follow's Kulik's story through testimonials from his doting mother, protective siblings, and through family photos and videos of a young, happy, excitable boy masking a painful secret.
After enduring the abuse well into his teens at the hands of a friend's uncle, Kulik enters adulthood on a wave of drug and alcohol addiction fueled by guilt and anger. At one point, he disappears from his family for nine years, during which time he lives on the street and is institutionalized 17 times.
"I'm a textbook case," he tells the camera, which is zoomed in close on a face tagged by scars, the result of a police intervention turned violent when he resisted custody.
As Kulik's story unfolds, it leads to Monterey, where Stephen Braveman leads the adult victims of male sexual abuse support group. Braveman claims there are only a few in the state and 30 to 40 worldwide.
The men involved in the group are from all walks of life, crossing all social and ethnic backgrounds. A Latino from Watsonville with aspirations to box professionally. A Santa Cruz County Sheriff's deputy. A Pacific Grove family man.
All carry the burden of shame that comes with being a male victim of child abuse, in a society where men are not supposed to be seen as victims, and the secret is tucked into the deepest corners of shadows.
"It's like being stabbed in the brain," said one group member.
Adds another, "One of the first things I learned in life is not to say anything."
For Kulik, the issue runs deep because he feels the added shame of keeping the secret from his family. Even during production, the Kuliks were not fully aware of the circumstances surrounding his abuse, a delicate situation for DeBono and Rosen.
"There was a point in there when the family did not know what happened to Glenn in detail. When they found out, it killed them," said Rosen. "They said 'You can't do this.'"
Ultimately, the family stood by the work, as did Mounteer, whose only concern stemmed from the amount of cursing that made the final cut.
Mounteer feels the film has a solid chance of affecting change in how people view the subject and in opening the door for victims to seek help.
"I think that, in a way, film is something that can touch many more people than I could handing out literature at a fair or speaking at a Rotary Club, or any of the things we do to reach out to the community," Mounteer said. "Film is a medium that is accessible to people and it can have a huge impact. It's visual. It's auditory."
Mounteer hopes to make copies available to the public as well as provide it to other rape crisis centers throughout the state as a resource tool. DeBono and Rosen have plans to screen it on the film festival circuit.
They have called the work their best to date, but the combination of time and energy, along with the serious subject matter, left them burned out for the first time.
"The hardest thing about making this film," said Rosen, "was talking about something people aren't willing to talk about."