Just, Melvin
James Ronald Whitney

(Sheffield International Documentary Festival on tour at the National Film Theatre, London, 27 January)

Child molestation is a crime all the more heinous because it is so hard to prove. It is notoriously difficult to prosecute adults who abuse a position of trust to harm children, who inevitably make unreliable witnesses. Just, Melvin has been made as a kind of alternative justice for the victims of Melvin Just, the film-maker's grandfather.

Over the course of the film, we hear that Melvin sexually abused just about everyone in two families, both of which he joined as a stepfather. We also hear that abuse became part of family life, as some of the abused became abusers themselves. His grandson James Ronald Whitney was molested by an uncle, but thanks to a fierce sense of competitiveness inherited from his mother, he fought his way through the worlds of exotic dancing and gameshows to become a stockbroker and film-maker.

Just, Melvin is not a happy story, but much of the film has a freakshow quality. Whitney's family are the kind of people who are unkindly referred to as trailer trash. Poverty and alcoholism are apparently endemic, but the family shares an indefatigable sense of humour. Uncle Jim's attempts to shack up with his half sister, and his (not wholly unconvincing) insistence that beer is the only thing keeping his invalid mother alive are pure comedy.

It is possible to watch the film quite callously until the appearance towards the end of Clarissa, a pretty girl of about 12. Suddenly, the horror of the situation comes to life as Clarissa tells how she too has been abused, and we are led to suspect that her prostitute mother had something to do with it. Whitney assured the audience after the screening that Clarissa is been looked after, but that it had been decided not to take her out of the family. In recent years, the family has been transformed into a bizarre but perhaps effective support group. Whitney himself has shown that it is possible to make a successful life without abandoning the family, and we can only hope that Clarissa does the same.

Only near the end of the film do we see Melvin himself, sitting on a pier in his wheelchair, devouring the hamburger that his grandson has bought him as payment for his participation. Since the theme of the film is the cycle of abuse - the theory that each generation of victims becomes the next generation of abusers - Melvin himself is really only a symbolic villain. We don't find out about Melvin's childhood, but according to the cycle theory, we must assume that he was himself abused. As an ugly and obnoxious old man though, he is an effective personification of generations of vice.

The family had always talked about what was happening, but in a small town in which Melvin was the only mechanic (and a damn good one, by all accounts), it was easier to let the situation lie. Nonetheless, Whitney vowed to see his grandfather dead or in jail by the time the film was finished. In fact, he had come close to making a case against Melvin for the murder of a district nurse (who had tried to help the children many years ago) when the old man died.

At the funeral, Melvin's various victims, many of them drunk, paid tribute to the man who despite everything had been their dad, step-dad or grandad. For the public who see it (having done the festival circuit, the film premieres on HBO on April 22, and may come to British TV soon), the film will serve less as an indictment of one man than as thought-provoking portrait of an extraordinary family.