Face of Hate is a documentary film about human redemption where deep trauma transformed into hate, is retransformed into love and consciousness.
Directed by Steffen Hou, this piece presents to us the story of Jason Baker, a man from Michigan, United States, who when still a child was exposed to the white supremacist movement, which he formally joined when young to become a domestic terrorist.
Steffen, whose family suffered the consequences of 20th century fascism in Denmark, meets Jason at the height of his hateful approach to life, explicit support for Nazism and white supremacist activities, including shooting practice, and begins to interview him. In the process he builds a personal relationship of quite honest and deep communication with Jason, who seems comfortable to share his lifestyle and hateful views with Steffen. The director expresses that, in all his career as a documentary maker, Jason is ‘the most complicated and hateful person I have ever met’.
The film is structured in a deeply illuminating way, and we get to see Jason’s context: his brother, his daughter, and some of his friends- who to begin with are also part of the white supremacist movement. The juxtaposition between the way he physically lives- in the Michigan countryside, raising pigs, with plenty of space to roam and a slow pace to his life, and his other experiences, of extreme violence and time in prison, makes this a gripping and politically significant, as well as educative story.
Empathy is the key to how we should approach Face of Hate, not least because it actually demonstrates to us empathy in action: from Steffen, and ultimately from Jason himself, his brother Nathan and in particular Jason’s daughters, who perhaps could have their own stories told.
Face of Hate asks us to grapple with trust, cynicism and deal with the seemingly ample evidence that human beings do not learn and do not change. The glaring point here is that, with support to deal with his unusually traumatic experiences as a child, in other words had his own country looked after him, Jason would not have led the life he led for many years. Documentaries like Face of Hate show the urgent need for systemic social and political change in how society supports its traumatised fellow humans, which saves them pain but also crucially avoids further pain by neutralising hateful trajectories. This cannot happen soon enough.