Cathy Henkel

Cathy Henkel is a South African documentary filmmaker who lives and works in Australia. Her works have typically focused on subjects of environmental activism, and to a lesser extent, the performing arts.

Her career in documentary film and television writing, directing and producing began in 1988. She had previously worked as an artistic director for an Australian amateur theatre company, the Shopfront Theater for Young People, for which she also wrote and directed performances. Her first documentary film Heroes of our time (1991) provided the first inside look at Greenpeace during one of its 'direct action' campaigns confronting oil company Caltex.

In 1992, Henkel met Jeff Canin on a sea turtle nesting beach in Queensland and they became partners in life and in work. Following the birth of their daughter Sam Lara, they formed Hatchling Productions with the intention of producing social issue and community-based documentaries. They also established a digital post-production editing studio in the northern rivers region of New South Wales. In 1999, Henkel wrote and directed Walking Through a Minefield (1999) which documented the blockade of the proposed Jabiluka uranium mine in Australia's Northern Territory. The film was financed by SBS Independent, the Australian Film Commission and the New South Wales Film and Television Office.

In 2003, Henkel wrote and directed her first TV documentary for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation entitled The man who stole my mother's face. The film followed Henkel's own search for justice for her mother following a traumatic sexual assault, and was awarded Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York in 2004. Henkel has twice explored the intersecting topics of deforestation and climate change with The Burning Season(2008) and Rise of the Eco-Warriors (2014). Henkel was the writer and director of both projects, which involved extensive travel and documentation of the expanding palm oil plantations of Indonesia and their social and environmental impacts.

...
Wikipedia