I, Pedophile dares to empathize
Matthew Campea knew it wouldn’t be easy to persuade viewers to welcome pedophiles into their living rooms. Yet I, Pedophile is so riveting and enlightening, you can’t stop watching it. It premieres Thursday at 9 p.m. on CBC’s doc series Firsthand.
Campea’s goal, bound to be controversial, was to bring empathy to troubled men who rarely get any.
“No other part of the population goes through such demonization and witch-hunts,” the 28-year-old director told me when I met him at a midtown café.
In the 44-minute film, we’re introduced to Bob Radke and Ed Chambers, two pedophiles living with the curse of forbidden desires. They dwell in the twilight zone of men who are sexually attracted to children. Neither of them has ever molested a child. Yet they are stigmatized and marginalized, forced to live bleak lives.
By a weird coincidence, the film is being aired by Canada’s public broadcaster just days before the same network presents the Canadian Screen Awards. One of the prizes handed out, for best first feature, has suddenly stopped being called the Claude Jutra Award.
That’s because of allegations in a recently published book that Jutra, the great Quebec director of Mon Oncle Antoine who died in 1986, had sex with underage boys.
I, Pedophile is not a film about Jutra, but it is bound to be just as controversial and disturbing as the sudden destruction of Jutra’s iconic status in Canadian movie history.
“There are no role models for you if you’re a 15-year-old guy and realize you have an attraction to 6-yearolds,” says Campea.
According to James Cantor, who plays a major part in the doc, there’s an interesting reason why some men are trapped in this situation. Cantor, a clinical psychologist at CAM Hand assistant professor at Uof T, is convinced that pedophiles are victims of nature — and that pedophilia is caused by a cross-wiring of the brain that some unlucky people are born with.
Campea was drawn into the subject when he was working for TVO’s show The Agenda. He was asked to make a short online doc in connection with a series on the brain. Campea was intrigued by the case of a man who had part of his frontal lobe removed to cure epilepsy — and soon after the operation was arrested in connection with child pornography.
His short doc went up on the TVO website briefly, and was taken down. That convinced Campea this needed to be the subject of a much longer documentary.
He couldn’t get it out of his mind. From then on for him “it was down the rabbit hole of men attracted to kids, who felt isolated and couldn’t talk to anyone about it.”
Campea took his ideas to veteran producers Robin Benger and Christopher Sumpton of Cogent-Benger Productions, seeking advice. To his astonishment, they offered to produce a doc if he would direct it. The budget was about $400,000.
“What people need to understand is that pedophilia is different from child molestation,” he explains.
Having your brain wired a certain way is not a matter of choice. “But the act of molestation is a choice,” says Campea, “and that’s what we need to condemn.”
Of course some pedophiles do molest children — including a few whose stories are told in the film. In those cases, the offenders do not appear on screen, but are portrayed by actors.
After the film was made, getting it on the air was challenge. I, Pedophile was rejected more than once before the CBC’s Charlotte Engel gave it a green light.
Part of the story takes place in Germany. But there’s a sad aspect of the film that exposes something unsettling about Canada during the Harper era.
An organization called Circles of Support and Accountability deals with sex offenders who have been released from prison — providing them with support to help them avoid reoffending.
The idea of offering support to sex offenders may seem bizarre, but it worked, delivering a large decline in the recidivism rate.
The organization was largely dependent on federal funding. But in 2014, alas, the federal government cancelled its support.
According to Campea, the organization is still operating, but in a reduced capacity.
If Justin Trudeau happens to watch this compelling doc, he might consider restoring the funding. mknelman@thestar.ca