Rob Munday
There have been some truly shocking stories told in the world of fiction filmmaking, but for me, it’s the narratives of the documentary that often impact the hardest. Coming up with a disturbing storyline all of your own is one thing, but sharing a real-life atrocity that many people will have never heard of, can leave a much heavier impression. Using found-footage to explore the Cleveland child abuse scandal, which rocked the UK in the late ’80s, Ben Young’s Saint Marietta delves into the history of an area plagued by sexual abuse allegations.
Young’s 13-minute film transports its viewers back to the North-East of England in the 1980s, to a town known for its industrial landscape of steelworks and chemical factories. Opening with a light-hearted tone, as we witness a dated heritage video that informs us how the town of Cleveland is trying to shed its “cloth cap” image, Saint Marietta soon adopts a much darker tone as the details of the scandal are revealed.
Young uses a combination of “professional archive and old home movies” to create the aesthetic for Saint Marietta
Despite employing archival footage to unravel, what Young describes as, “the strange and tangled story of how one doctor’s dedication snowballed into a catastrophe”, Saint Marietta is far from a straight retelling of events. Opting instead to frame his story as a “direct address” to one of the primary instigators of the allegations, Dr. Marietta Higgs, enabled the filmmaker “to engage in-depth with an evasive subject who – across more than thirty years – appears to have never gone on the record with any journalist or filmmaker”. It was this narrative approach that opened a lot of “creative doors” for Young.
“Instead of depicting the actual scandal in image, I wanted to create a sort of intuitive visual counterpoint”
“Going in, I was wary of some of the trashy tropes that can bedevil subject matter like this: sinister photo negatives, schlocky scores, that sort of thing”, the director explains. “Instead of depicting the actual scandal in image, I wanted to create a sort of intuitive visual counterpoint: a poetic tribute to these communities as they existed just prior to the Cleveland Abuse Panic. With a bit of research, I was able to assemble a combination of professional archive and old home movies to compose that visual narrative”.
With the director himself admitting that he found out about the scandal “entirely by chance”, a lot of Saint Marietta’s impact comes from the fact that there’s such little modern-day knowledge of such a horrific incident in English history. With my Mother born and raised in Yorkshire, an area I spent most of my childhood holidays exploring in the ’80s, it comes as a real surprise not to have known more about the allegations and their repercussions before encountering Young’s film. I have the excuse of only being nine at the time of the events, but following a conversation with mum, she had no recollection of them either.
You can imagine the kind of press coverage such a catastrophe would evoke nowadays and it was surprisingly the modern world that was a key motivator for Young when creating Saint Marietta. “There is a lot of certainty, self-righteousness, and social contagion about these days, people trapped in their own tribes and filter bubbles”, the filmmaker reveals as we discuss his aims. “I wanted to step outside my comfort zone and make a compassionate film about someone who I find equal parts tragic and repellent: the primary author of a moral panic that scarred hundreds of people, many of them my neighbours”.