One Minute to Nine had its North American Premiere at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, TX. The film tells the heartbreaking story of Wendy Maldonado and how decades of domestic abuse finally led her to kill her abusive husband. The film was well-received by an audience deeply sympathetic to her predicament.
The film is beautifully edited. The use of the family's home videos to supplement the 5-day footage with some historical background is powerful. The story that they tell is emotionally devastating, but it feels like half a story that raises more questions that it answers. Much more could have been done if they had chosen to interview the lawyers, the law enforcement officials, the judge, and experts of domestic violence to build a larger context around Wendy's specific case.
In some ways, the inherent drama of the story of Wendy and her children is more compelling and disturbing than the film Tommy Davis has made. Davis set out to make a film about how a family copes with the prospect that a loved one is being sent to prison in a few days. They apparently, almost accidentally, stumbled on Wendy Maldonado and her case which raises all sorts of legal and moral questions about domestic violence. They succeeded in telling that limited story that they set out to tell, but film doesn't seem to go far nearly far enough in exploring the societal implications of this tragedy which ultimately seems more important than the relatively narrow project that they present to the audience.
By telling her story they open up many important political, social and cultural questions, which they chose not to systematically address. Their narrow focus allows them to focus on the brief window of time leading up to her incarceration and the family history that led up to it, but they choose not to explore the deeper questions of the failure of the system that led up to this tragedy.
Why didn't the police arrest her husband for assault and domestic abuse during the proceeding 2 decades of abuse? Couldn't she have left him and sought a restraining order? Why didn't her family and friends help her to get out of this situation? Where were the social service agencies? Why did she get such a long prison sentence? What sort of legal representation did she have that advised her to take the plea bargain offered her? Is there an effort to get her a pardon or clemency? Decades after the "Burning Bed" made this sort of occurrence a national shame, how often does this still happen in the US and how can it be stopped?
While it is always easy to criticize documentary film makers for the film that they didn't make, in this case, the story cries out for a deeper examination and what they have done feels like it has opened up a door, but failed to walk through it. The film is compelling and important for what it shows us; however, it also feels narrow and unsatisfactory, because there is so much more that we need to know to try to understand the broader social and political implications of why Wendy is sitting in prison cell today.
