A woman seeks closure by documenting a confrontation with her childhood abuser

‘I just want to give him back the shame he left me with for all these years.’

On 31 December 2003, Lucie Tremblay set out to confront the man who had sexually abused her from the age of eight to 12 years old. Equipped with a handheld camera and a letter to her abuser, Tremblay travelled 12 hours through Quebec to the remote municipality of Val-Brillant, unsure whether or not the man still lived there – or was even alive. Tremblay’s video diary of the drive sat dormant for some 10 years until it was discovered by her son, the Québécois filmmaker Loïc Darses. Constructed with deep care and sensitivity, Darses’s found-footage documentary, A Woman and Her Car (2015), is both a wrenching account of what it takes to confront an abuser and a powerful tribute to Tremblay’s courage, strength and maternal love.