Left Write Hook review: survivor documentary stings like a bee

Trigger warning: sexual abuse

At first, the arts of writing and boxing might feel like they belong in disparate worlds, one a cerebral space favoured by those who are sleight of frame and ferocity, the other championing matter over mind.

It is an unhelpful bias easily disproven. A good fighter thrives on strategy and technique, just as a writer flexes muscular ideas.

Muhammad Ali brought both, as sharp of mind as right hooks, even if he memorably perpetuated the stereotype by suggesting, ‘Keats and Shelley … were pretty good poets, but they died young. You know why? Because they didn’t train’.

In fact, both Keats and Shelley were notable street fighters. So it shouldn’t seem as unlikely a combination when the staunch Dr Donna Lyon, a film producer and lecturer in screen studies at the Victorian College of the Arts, combines the pair in her remarkable support group, Left Write Hook, for women who have experienced sexual abuse.

ScreenHub: Producer Donna Lyon fights to honour sexual abuse survivors

Adopting a groundbreaking approach informed by her lived experience, Lyon’s work has resulted in a documentary of the same name, which has debuted at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF). Directed by Shannon Owen, a former support worker in a refuge housing women fleeing domestic violence, it follows Lyon’s intensive program bringing together seven women with very different experiences but a shared legacy of trauma that manifests in diverse ways. Lyon shares her own journey too.

The right to be angry

Sitting together in a gym environment is difficult enough for women who have struggled to communicate their experiences beyond a therapist’s office, exacerbated by the shame that is too often held bone-deep in a country that still struggles to have vital conversations about the shocking epidemic of violence against women.

Warning them that, while this is a safe space, it is also one that will inevitably be triggering, Lyon encourages the collective to work through that pain by sparring plus letting loose on punching bags. Then they channel their feelings of rage, despair, shame and more through creative writing exercises inspired by prompts like ‘To punch is to …’

Lyon reinforces their right to be angry, encouraging physical and intellectual catharsis. Full of impossibly generous testimonies, Left Write Hook is both difficult, as fury and despair are writ large across the group’s faces, and incredible to witness the healing power of arming themselves with both boxing gloves and the mighty pens, opening the possibility of healing long thought unachievable. Several of the engaging participants share that boxing is helping them reconnect with their bodies, in which dislocation has long been held as the only way to survive.

Shot by cinematographers Ella Sowinska and David Rusanow, much of Left Write Hook is an intimately drawn portrait that feels as if we’re thrust into the ring with the women, built out with personal video essays by the participants, as caught on their smartphones.

There is also a handsome lensing of Melbourne herself and dreamier interludes, such as one capturing one of the women solo in a room in which the walls, floor and ceiling are chalkboard black, as she writes screeds in a Catherine wheel around herself, leaving the trace of her absence on departing. It’s mesmerising.

Poetry with punch

The raw honesty of the poetry that pours forth from these women, some of it set to music as one participant gloriously reengages with youthful dreams of performance, gives the immortal lines of Keats and Shelley a run for their street-fighting money. It’s great to see their healing endeavours coalescing into a book of the same name.

As the group workshops the book’s introductory text, it’s fascinating, too, to see how they work out the line between Lyon’s faith and the traumatic experience several members have experienced at the hands of organised religion. It’s a textbook example of difficult but respectful conversation, a skill that’s all too often missing from public discourse.

A rewarding watch, Left Write Hook is never lost in the appalling truths it reveals. The palpable positive impact the book launch has on the group is potent stuff indeed. ‘I’m not sure survivor is a good enough word yet,’ one offers. ‘Maybe it’s a revivor?’

And it is reviving. When one participant says she feels accepted and loved for the parts of herself that she had thought irreparably broken, the nimble dance of Lyon’s – and Owen’s – work is crystal clear. It floats through the film like a butterfly that also stings like a bee.

Left Write Hook is currently showing as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival. Find out more. It releases nationally in cinemas on 24 October. Watch the Left Write Hook trailer.