Ivan’s story perfectly told

Keith Hunter’s one-man band had just the right members, writes Colleen Reilly.

I am not usually a fan of this hybrid called “docudrama”. The Remand Of Ivan Curry is an exception — and was also an exceptional production.

Its success was perhaps partly due to the fact that it was one man’s baby. Keith Hunter researched, wrote, produced, directed and narrated the programme. The last credit named the production company as Hunter Productions — I’ll say! But the one-man band school of filmmaking can also turn out some awful, closed-minded sermons. Hunter avoided that trap completely.

The programme opened immediately in a courtroom — before the titles — introducing the “drama” part; then a brief voiceover introduced the “real” part. The story itself was on a fairly common theme, the miscarriage of justice, or, “… the mindset … that happens in many cases”; as a defence lawyer put it. In this case the wrongly accused and wrongly imprisoned defendant, Ivan Curry, was profoundly deaf, and illiterate. And although the programme showed how this complicated matters further, it primarily used the Curry case to illustrate the fallibility of the police and court systems for anyone, able or disabled.

The editing was superb. We were taken from the courtroom, with mostly actors, to Ivan himself re-enacting scenes, to interviews with participants, to talking-heads including experts on the deaf and on the law as well as vox-pop opinions. A very effective transitional device often used was a “watercolour” painting technique. Interviews were the way interviews should always be: hard questions asked politely, and those telling silences on the interviewee’s part left to linger on the screen.

Voiceover was informative rather than emotive, although not pretending a dishonest neutrality either.

Perhaps most effective, however, for television reasons, was the structuring of the storyline itself. Presumably some viewers already knew the outcome — of the trial, and the explanation for the child’s death — but those of us who didn’t were kept as tensed and alert as when watching a good thriller/detective story. This could have been a cheap device, but it wasn’t: it was necessary to the “drama” aspect of this documentary, and appeared chronologically just as it had in reality.

On top of that, all of the acting, from major roles to minor, was excellent. Ivan Curry was, of course, the main actor, acting himself in reconstructions and in “real life”. His appearance and performance taught us a lot about the deaf as well as acquainted us with who he was. The final line of the programme was, “No one ever said sorry to Ivan … there is no compensation for Ivan Curry”. This is undoubtedly true in the sense of financial compensation, but there is hopefully some emotional compensation in the vindication this programme achieved.

Caption: Ivan Curry: by New Zealand artist David Shennan.