Please contact us
with corrections
or breaking news
Berkeley Doc Short Gets Oscar Nod by Doug Oakley/courtesy Oakland Tribune
Producer/director of the Academy Award nominated doc 'Facing Fear', Jason Cohen (lft) with Co-producer/Editor Tom Christopher in Berkeley's Zaentz Media Center. photo: Doug Oakley
COULD YOU FOREGIVE SOMEONE WHO
disagrees with your sexual orientation so vehemently that he straps razor blades to his boots, kicks you in the head and leaves you for dead?
That's the heavy question pondered in a 23-minute documentary by a Berkeley filmmaker up for an Academy Award on Sunday night.
"I don't know if I could forgive someone the way he has been able to forgive me," says former neo-Nazi skinhead Tim Zaal, 48, in the opening line of "Facing Fear."
"I knew the only way I was going to get past it was to forgive him," says his victim, and now friend, Matthew Boger. "And that is a huge undertaking."
The story retells the horrific beating of Boger by Zaal and 13 of his jackbooted buddies in the late 1980s and proceeds through 25 years of guilt and anger experienced by both of them, followed by a chance meeting between tormentor and victim in the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, of all places.