Forgiveness

This month, Docurama is releasing the DVD edition of "Forgiveness: A Time to Love and A Time to Hate", almost concurrently with the production's run on PBS. Written, directed and produced by Emmy-winning director Helen Whitney ("American Inquisition", "The Mormons"), "Forgiveness" lucidly explores the hardships and dead ends that individuals and whole societies face when called upon to leave the past behind.

A central message of this two-part, nearly three-hour documentary is that the process of forgiveness often requires substantial time in the trenches of hate. A microcosmic portrait of this struggle comes from author Terri Jentz, who explains how she came to reject holistic, therapeutic models of forgiveness as a sort of "cheap grace"; in Jentz's case, she only came to a place of emotional healing when she worked for nearly two decades to bring a roving psychopath, who had maimed her and a friend with an ax, to justice under the law.

On a much larger scale, Whitney sheds light on the many members of Rwanda's Tutsi communities who do not feel the Hutus could ever atone enough for their hair-trigger genocide of one-time neighbors and friends in the early 1990s. Similarly, Jewish communities the world over wonder whether forgiving the Holocaust will lead to its recurrence.

In hashing out these and many other maddeningly complex scenarios, Whitney's film gives both proponents and opponents of forgiveness equal ground to state their cases. From the outset, she also refrains from offering a definitive definition of forgiveness since, as the film makes clear, it is a subjective experience that each of us only has, when and if we're ready.

Forgiveness: A Time for Love & A Time for Hate
DVD
$29.95
http://www.newvideo.com