Cathy Henkel - Producer, Director, Writer

Cathy Henkel has worked as a writer, producer and director of documentaries since 1988. Her television documentary debut was Heroes Of Our Time – the first inside look at Greenpeace during one of its dramatic ‘direct action’ campaigns.

Cathy’s television credits include ‘Walking Through a Minefield’, ‘Losing Layla’, ‘Spike Milligan: I Told You I was Ill’ and ‘The Man Who Stole My Mother's Face’.

The latter film - a very personal story about Cathy’s search for justice for her mother who was brutally raped in South Africa – received much critical acclaim, winning ‘Best Documentary’ at the Australian IF Awards and at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival in 2004.

Cathy wrote, directed and co-produced 'The Burning Season'. The film took 18 months to complete and took Cathy to four continents and new levels of commitment and endurance. Filming took place in such diverse places as the top of the Empire State Building in New York, the corridors of power in Washington, remote villages and forests in the Indonesian provinces of Aceh and Jambi, the forests of Borneo, and office buildings overlooking Sydney Harbour. A television version film was completed in June 2008 and had its world premiere at the Brisbane International Film Festival on 2 August 2008 where it won the Audience Choice Award, and went on to win the Australian IF Award for Best Documentary. Following its public and critical acclaim, Cathy and co-producer Trish Lake decided to team up with distributor Gil Scrine to release the film in cinemas in Australia. The world premiere of the new cinema version was held in New York in April as part of the Tribeca Film festival. The film will launch in Australia in June.

Cathy now lives in Brisbane and has formed a new company Virgo Productions Pty Ltd with a focus on producing both fiction and non-fiction feature films for release across multiple platforms including cinema, DVD, television and online. Her next project is a feature documentary on internationally-renowned Australian cinematographer, Don McAlpine, and a feature film based on the documentary 'The Man who Stole my Mother's Face'. She is also completing a PhD at Queensland University of Technology.