I've seen horror films and upsetting war movies but in the realm of fiction or atrocious historical contexts, some tragic realities are easier to grasp for there is always the satisfaction that our present is better than what has just been shown to us.
However, there are some documentaries that are here to remind us that some sad realities can hit home and the unfairness is all the more unbearable because it hides behind the shield of legality. Indeed, what can you say about a childcare worker whose dedication to children is driven by a desire to provide them the best and eventually separate them from toxic or abusive parents? Is 'abuse' such a vague notion it can afford gray areas?
Whatever your opinion is on that matter "Take Care of Maya" will either cause a change of heart or reinforce your conviction that parenting is in a big, big trouble in our post-modern societies and would even make you wish to live in a third-world country where parents still have a saying on their children's future... I'm carefully weighting my assumptions but it's precisely because I live in a Western country and I am the father of two girls that, if anything, "Take Care of Maya" resonated like a nightmarish warning.
As intolerable as the loss or the kidnapping or even the murder of a child are, you can accuse an abominable fate; even a medical error, if truly admitted, can allow you to accept, if not forgive, the fault. But this is case where a family, the Kowalskys, a retired firefighter and a nurse forming a happy upper-class couple with two children, were deprived from one family member: little Maya, on the presumption that she was mistreated by her parents, by giving her a specific drug to appease her pains.
I won't expand on it because all it takes is to google the names and you know exactly what the story is about. What interests me here is the documentary and its depiction of the harrowing journey a couple, then a family went through to prove that nothing was wrong in their parenting, that they were following a prescription from an eminent doctor... and so little Maya was neither suffering from some psychosomatic disorders or was victim of a Munchausen by proxy syndrome.
But that went over the head of a doctor who made a speciality of finding hints of parental abuse in the most obscure cases, responsible for so many cases of forced separations that you'd think there was a personal interest to it... the woman in question has an ironic stern and keen look that reminded me of Nurse Ratched from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" but it's not the woman only that earns our contempt but the whole medical system and its maneuvers to literally gaslight a family, turning husband and wife against each other and creating the kind of judicial mayhem where it all comes down to a woman being forbidden to see her daughter or even to hug her.
The documentary opens with the kind of exposition that allows us to know more about the parents, their backgrounds, their personalities... and that the mother Beata comes from a Polish background and had the makings of a winner ultimately foreshadows her tragic fate. Such people are capable to fight and fight back but once it's the law against you, once your very reactions actually comforted the idea that you were a threat and that your own being undermines your daughter's well-being, what's left to do?
I was shocked, saddened, revolted, going through so many emotions that I ended up crying in that moment where poor Maya explained why she was scared of going back to the hospital... it's truly a gut-wrenching documentary, so gripped in reality that it couldn't even afford a happy ending, only a streak of frustrating trial cancellations and postponing where the only silver lining is that the family remains strong and united with their anger, their grief and their traumas, no matter what...
Such a thin consolation and the ending credits won't even help... this is an important documentary for two reasons: it's the closest to justice done to one forever-shattered family, and all the other ill-fated ones that went through similar experiences; secondly, it's a cruel reminder of the real abuse of power in societies that became way so civilized they weaponized their own 'values' against those who are supposed to be protected... there is something really rotten in this world... and think twice before you call a hospital... there are multiple layers of what we call "abuse".
I have a colleague at school whose goddaughter was separated from her parents because her bone fragility was mistaken for parental violence and the parents are still struggling... on the other hand, my partner just helped one of her students to get transferred to another family because she was abused by her father... for ten children saved from abusive parents' paws, should we accept one mistake? No, because, one is too many...
And there is more than one, anyway...
However, there are some documentaries that are here to remind us that some sad realities can hit home and the unfairness is all the more unbearable because it hides behind the shield of legality. Indeed, what can you say about a childcare worker whose dedication to children is driven by a desire to provide them the best and eventually separate them from toxic or abusive parents? Is 'abuse' such a vague notion it can afford gray areas?
Whatever your opinion is on that matter "Take Care of Maya" will either cause a change of heart or reinforce your conviction that parenting is in a big, big trouble in our post-modern societies and would even make you wish to live in a third-world country where parents still have a saying on their children's future... I'm carefully weighting my assumptions but it's precisely because I live in a Western country and I am the father of two girls that, if anything, "Take Care of Maya" resonated like a nightmarish warning.
As intolerable as the loss or the kidnapping or even the murder of a child are, you can accuse an abominable fate; even a medical error, if truly admitted, can allow you to accept, if not forgive, the fault. But this is case where a family, the Kowalskys, a retired firefighter and a nurse forming a happy upper-class couple with two children, were deprived from one family member: little Maya, on the presumption that she was mistreated by her parents, by giving her a specific drug to appease her pains.
I won't expand on it because all it takes is to google the names and you know exactly what the story is about. What interests me here is the documentary and its depiction of the harrowing journey a couple, then a family went through to prove that nothing was wrong in their parenting, that they were following a prescription from an eminent doctor... and so little Maya was neither suffering from some psychosomatic disorders or was victim of a Munchausen by proxy syndrome.
But that went over the head of a doctor who made a speciality of finding hints of parental abuse in the most obscure cases, responsible for so many cases of forced separations that you'd think there was a personal interest to it... the woman in question has an ironic stern and keen look that reminded me of Nurse Ratched from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" but it's not the woman only that earns our contempt but the whole medical system and its maneuvers to literally gaslight a family, turning husband and wife against each other and creating the kind of judicial mayhem where it all comes down to a woman being forbidden to see her daughter or even to hug her.
The documentary opens with the kind of exposition that allows us to know more about the parents, their backgrounds, their personalities... and that the mother Beata comes from a Polish background and had the makings of a winner ultimately foreshadows her tragic fate. Such people are capable to fight and fight back but once it's the law against you, once your very reactions actually comforted the idea that you were a threat and that your own being undermines your daughter's well-being, what's left to do?
I was shocked, saddened, revolted, going through so many emotions that I ended up crying in that moment where poor Maya explained why she was scared of going back to the hospital... it's truly a gut-wrenching documentary, so gripped in reality that it couldn't even afford a happy ending, only a streak of frustrating trial cancellations and postponing where the only silver lining is that the family remains strong and united with their anger, their grief and their traumas, no matter what...
Such a thin consolation and the ending credits won't even help... this is an important documentary for two reasons: it's the closest to justice done to one forever-shattered family, and all the other ill-fated ones that went through similar experiences; secondly, it's a cruel reminder of the real abuse of power in societies that became way so civilized they weaponized their own 'values' against those who are supposed to be protected... there is something really rotten in this world... and think twice before you call a hospital... there are multiple layers of what we call "abuse".
I have a colleague at school whose goddaughter was separated from her parents because her bone fragility was mistaken for parental violence and the parents are still struggling... on the other hand, my partner just helped one of her students to get transferred to another family because she was abused by her father... for ten children saved from abusive parents' paws, should we accept one mistake? No, because, one is too many...
And there is more than one, anyway...