One of the hottest documentaries on Netflix right now is the true-crime film Abducted In Plain Sight, the story of a man who manipulated a whole family into a submissive position in order to steal one of their children for his pedophilic fantasies.
The incident happened in the early 1970s in a sleepy American church-going town. Jan Broberg was only 12 and her abuser was her family's best friend Robert Berchtold.
Berchtold seemed like the perfect uncle figure until it was revealed he had always been setting the Broberg's up for his ultimate goal - to have Jan all to himself.
Audiences have been enthralled with the documentary, and the film's director, Skye Borgman, is at Northern FanCon in Prince George to talk to fans about the strange case, and the way film gets made.
With all of the true-crime stories out there, so many of them stranger than fiction, what was it that attracted Borgman to Jan Broberg's complex case? It all started with the book the Borgman family wrote about the protracted incident, a set of events that lasted years and ended up in a fascinating court battle.
"It really was how I am interested in the human condition and why they do the things they do, or why they don't do the things they don't do," Borgman said. "I read the book and came away with more questions than when I went in, and that was appealing to me, that sense of wanting to know more. I could not figure out how a little girl could get kidnapped twice by the same guy, and really even more times, almost. That really drove me."
Maybe it was the book already being behind them. Maybe it was the court case already behind them. Who knows why, but when Borgman's cameras rolled to interview the many players in this unique drama, they revealed things that had never been discussed in open public about all the facets of how Berchtold had insinuated himself into their lives and taken hold of them all with a manipulative grip of secrecy and shame.
In the book, the Brobergs do not disclose how the perpetrator, their trusted family friend, managed to foster affairs with both Jan's mother and Jan's father, and used that as a secret pressure point in his ultimate goals of making off with their child to be his sexual gratification object and emotional toy.
But they told all this to Borgman's camera.
"I really respect the Brobergs for taking responsibility for their own actions and their own part in this ordeal, and talking about what they did in such an open way," Borgman said.
"Telling their story took so much more bravery and courage from them than the actual acts. You can fall into situations, succumb to emotions, and that takes you in different directions, but then to talk about it in such a public way is so respectable. And their intentions have always been to use their story to try to try to prevent more victims, because their story shows how so often the perpetrator is someone you know and trust and have your own interactive feelings for. It's almost never a stranger. The big stories are the ones where the stranger abducts a woman, she gets away years later, and that grabs big headlines."
These other kinds of more personal abduction or abuse stories happen more frequently, Borgman surmised, but they get less of the public's attention because of the less sensational interpersonal connections between the victims and the perpetrators.
Borgman's documentary storytelling was helped by having willing interviewees, court documents, tape recordings, even family movies.
She scored quality points by adding dramatizations, but ones that were shot on 8mm film to mimic the family movies. The actors doing the recreations blended seamlessly.
Borgman will discuss these topics, techniques and much more at Northern FanCon on today and Sunday at CN Centre. She is one of the guest speakers for the Women In Film panel today at 2:30 p.m., then conducts a solo workshop on Sunday at 2 p.m. on directing and producing an independent film.
The workshop is entitled From Indie to Netflix: The 20-Year Path to Overnight Success.
