http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/arts/private-violence-an-hbo-documentary-on-domestic-abuse.html 2014-10-20 01:08:28 ‘Private Violence,’ an HBO Documentary on Domestic Abuse “Private Violence,” a film by Cynthia Hill, seeks to prompt a more urgent response to domestic abuse, largely by looking at one victim. === A lot of people are talking about domestic violence lately because of certain high-profile cases, and some may even think they know what it looks like because they’ve watched a video of a National Football League player punching his fiancée. The film, by Cynthia Hill, is not a definitive examination of domestic violence but an effort to prompt a more urgent response to it, largely by looking at one victim. She is a North Carolina woman, Deanna Walters, and the photographs of her after an assault by her estranged husband might make you turn away from your television. Her story becomes a case study — of flaws in the police and judicial responses, of the obstacles a woman faces if she wants to escape an abuser. Is it representative of the overall problem, or are some instances of domestic turmoil more ambiguous? Ms. Hill’s film doesn’t care; its objective is to change the presumptions so that victims are not fighting an uphill battle from the beginning. One of those presumptions, incidentally, addressed briefly in the film via a stunning audiotape, is that domestic violence is a lower-class phenomenon. The man we hear on the tape screaming and becoming physically violent, we’re told, is a doctor. Ms. Hill’s window into this world is “I sometimes refer to restraining orders as a last will and testament,” she tells the interviewer. “There’s probably 45 or 50 orders here, and every single one of the women who went to obtain these orders of protection was murdered in precisely the ways that they said they would be.”