You can't fault Mark Henderson for enterprise. In 2003, he was kidnapped by leftist guerrillas in a remote, mountainous jungle area in the north of Colombia and held for three months. The experience would have broken many people, and few would have wanted to relive it. But as well as being a victim, Henderson is also a film-maker, and here was a powerful story, albeit a painfully personal one. When, out of the blue, he got an email from one of his kidnappers, a young Colombian called Antonio, he knew he had to go back and make a film.
It could have been an adventure movie: he and seven other young backpackers are taken at gunpoint from their camp at the Lost City, one of Colombia's most important archaeological sites in the Sierra Nevada mountains near Santa Marta; they are marched through the jungle from one guerrilla base to the next with the army in hot pursuit; one captive escapes, surviving for 12 days without food and getting back to tell his story; four others attempt to escape; they are eventually released; and Mark returns home on Christmas Eve. But instead, in My Kidnapper, he has adopted an altogether more measured approach, focusing on the reunion with Antonio and the quest to understand his motives.
Henderson and his fellow backpackers' ordeal began at 4.30am on 12 September. "I remember looking at my watch almost as soon as they burst in," he tells me. "Your immediate thought is they're waking us up for breakfast, but they weren't knocking nicely on the door [of our hut]. You could make out they had uniforms on and were carrying guns, but that's not a strange thing for Colombia, and they were telling us in very fast Spanish that they were paramilitaries and that they wanted to take us away for our own safety because two people had just been killed on the path we'd walked in on."
They weren't paramilitaries – the private security forces employed by landowners in the area. They were guerrillas from the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), a Marxist group that has been active in Colombia for almost 50 years. They took Henderson and a British student, Matthew Scott, four Israelis, a Spaniard, and Reini Weigel, a 30-year-old German woman, on an exhausting trek through the jungle with almost nothing to eat. Within a day, Scott made a break for it and managed to get away, spending 12 days in the jungle and living off rainwater before being rescued. The others were taken east through the mountains.
The ELN wanted two things from the kidnap: publicity, which they got immediately as it became a huge story internationally, and a commission to investigate alleged abuse by paramilitaries of the indigenous people in the region. Eventually, a deal was brokered that allowed for an investigation, and the hostages were released.
Henderson, 31 at the time, lost two stone during the ordeal. He says the experience has left him better able to cope with stress, but it took a while to come to terms with what had happened. "I had some form of post-traumatic stress disorder about four months after getting back. You realise we could have died up there. You try not to think about that at the time, so you process it afterwards."
Even while he was being held, Henderson knew he would want to make a film about the kidnap. "In my head I'd practise my Oscar speech. It was a way of dealing with the situation, of getting through. I had to take this horrible situation and turn it into a positive." So how to make that film? "When I came home, I wanted to tell the story, but if it was just going to be a retrospective like Touching the Void [Kevin Macdonald's 2003 film about a climbing expedition in the Andes that went dramatically wrong] or one of those Discovery documentaries, that didn't really interest me. I thought I'd do a book instead, concentrating on the first eight days, but I started to have night terrors and nightmares about it. You're not given any help when you come home, but luckily I met a psychologist who was an expert in hostages and she basically told me I wasn't going mad, which was what I wanted to hear. I gave up the idea of writing a book, decided to get on with my life instead, and went back to work."
The film might never have been made if Henderson hadn't been contacted in November 2004 by Antonio, the most educated and civilised of the kidnappers. The initial contact was made by a Colombian priest who had been part of the negotiations over the release. "At first I didn't know what to do," says Henderson. "Should I phone the Met police's hostage unit? Did I want people to go chasing him? I didn't know whether to engage with him, and it took a couple of weeks for me to send an email back. The first thing that struck me was that he [Antonio] didn't use the word 'kidnap'. He talked about it as 'the experience'. Even now he prefers to talk about the kidnapping in the abstract." So what did Antonio want? "I like to think that he wanted to explain his side of the story," says Henderson. "It was his way of saying sorry."
I get in touch with Antonio, who no longer lives in Colombia, and ask him via email why he had made contact. His reasons sound less altruistic than Henderson suggests. "I could talk to him [Henderson] a lot about a number of different subjects," he tells me. "I think to a certain extent we had become friends. I knew he would have many questions about what had happened to us, and that they needed an explanation. I also thought getting in touch could be the opportunity I was looking for to be able to leave Colombia and start a new life." Antonio, who was 21 when he joined the ELN and is now 32, says he does feel guilt, especially about Weigel, who has still not recovered from the kidnap. "It's been impossible for Reini to overcome what happened," he says, "and it has caused her all types of problems. I sincerely hope she can get her life back together."
Henderson went back to Colombia in 2009 with Weigel and two of the Israeli captives. In the film, they revisit the camp from which they were kidnapped, follow the route of the trek, and discuss their differing attitudes to being held. The Israelis were always looking to resist and did manage to escape briefly, an episode that could have cost them their lives; Henderson was more pragmatic, just trying to ensure they all got back safely. As for Weigel, she seems to have been isolated in her suffering.
The crux of the documentary comes when Henderson and Weigel eventually meet Antonio, and the latter attempts to explain the kidnap. "It was never supposed to inspire fear," he tells them. "It was a way of putting pressure on people to improve the situation."
Antonio tells me he was anxious ahead of the reunion. "I didn't know how they would react, if they would be very angry, if they only came to reproach me about things. However, it was the exact opposite, and I think that the meeting was therapeutic for them because it helped to close a very important chapter in our lives. To that extent it was a triumph of forgiveness over resentment."
How did Henderson feel when he came face to face with Antonio again? "As we were driving towards him I can remember asking myself how am I supposed to react to this? Reini and I discussed what we were supposed to say. I'd never been in this situation, and I didn't know anyone who had. We asked ourselves whether we were supposed to shake hands. Then, when we met, we just automatically hugged." In the film, it is a strange, standoffish embrace between people who have shared an intense experience, yet have no idea what that experience meant.
"One thing I didn't feel was hatred," says Henderson. "If anything, I felt excited. This was the culmination of five years in which we'd been emailing each other. The anger came later when we were interviewing him. At first, it was almost like meeting an old friend. The first few things we spoke about were catching up on the people who'd been in the mountains with us, and it was only when he started listing people who were in prison, people who'd been shot, people who were dead, that you realised it wasn't an old friend you were meeting."
There are flashes of anger in the conversation that follows, but the drama is weakened by the fact that they had always felt an affinity. Henderson and Weigel, unlike the harder-edged Israeli captives, had wanted to believe in the justice of the ELN cause, even if their return visit and a meeting with local people tired of being caught in the crossfire of a war between guerrillas, army and paramilitaries disabused them of their more romantic notions. They saw Antonio and his girlfriend Camila, who also took part in the kidnap, as more approachable than the other guerrillas. In meeting again, the distance that has to be travelled towards reconciliation is relatively narrow. It is perhaps telling that Antonio refused to meet the Israelis. As well as not trusting them to keep his whereabouts secret – the meeting took place in the country in which he now lives – he may have realised that even his partial justifications would have fallen on stony ground.
What anger there is comes from Weigel's continuing trauma. On the eve of her release a month before Henderson in 2003, she had allowed herself to be photographed with two guerrillas while smiling and holding a gun. She insists she was just pleased to be leaving, and wanted a souvenir to show her parents. But the German media used the photograph against her, suggesting she had supported the guerrillas' cause and in effect been holidaying in the jungle. The German government has spent the last seven years trying to make her reimburse the cost of the helicopter in which she was flown out of the mountains, and a recent court judgment means she will have to pay €16,000 (£13,800).
Weigel now lives in Chamonix in the French Alps and is about to have her first child. She sounds stressed on the phone. "I have inflammatory problems and terrible back pains caused by all the walking we were forced to do," she says. "I am a strong woman, but I was weaker than the guys and couldn't deal with having no food. I kept collapsing." She tells me how two of the guards "touched me where they shouldn't"; when they met in 2009, Antonio told her that if the other guerrillas had known this, the two who assaulted her would have been shot. During her captivity she missed female company. "The guys just talked about their poo all day," she says, "what colour it was."
The kidnap made her anxious and morbid. "Before, I felt I was just a normal girl. I hadn't been faced with imminent death. It made me think about mortality – not my own death so much, but other people's. I was terrified that my brother or my parents might die. When I got back, I called them every day because I feared they might be dead. Before, I just lived; after this, I was much more aware of mortality."
She says going back to Colombia and meeting Antonio has helped. "It gave me a chance to face the past. I cried when I went back to the camp where I got kidnapped. That's the point at which my life changed. After that, I was a different person. But it gave me a lot of peace where I didn't have peace before." She believes that, despite his convoluted defence of his actions, Antonio did eventually offer a complete apology. "He explained why he got into it and how he could ever think it justifiable, but now he says nothing can justify kidnapping." Psychologically, she feels she has consigned the kidnap to the past, but the physical legacy and the legal nightmare continue. "As long as I have the financial issue and the government are always on me," she says, "how can I possibly be free of it?"
"She felt it was like a huge weight lifted off her shoulders," says Henderson of Weigel's reaction to meeting Antonio. "There was so much we didn't know about what had happened to us. He gave us explanations. There were no questions he wouldn't answer. We wanted to know his reasons for taking part in the kidnap, and for details on specifics – why did we move on certain days, why was Reini kept separate from the rest of us at certain times, why was she released early? The one thing that sparked anger was his reluctance to understand the kidnap from our point of view. He always seemed to have a justification for everything. But he came to realise that what he did went against all his principles. After meeting us again, he understood more what we'd been through. He came to realise my parents weren't just a newspaper headline; they were real people."
Henderson has his film; Weigel will soon have her baby; Antonio is forging a new life outside Colombia. Each hopes finally to find a way out of the jungle. "I continue to be part of the left and to criticise the Colombian state," Antonio tells me. "Poverty, unemployment, inequality, corruption, paramilitaries and the age-old neglect of the countryside remain. But the guerrillas have become discredited. The impossibility of making their political ideas known, their isolation from the cities, and their continued practice of kidnapping civilians and financing themselves with drug trafficking have done irreversible damage to their image. I was fed up of war, and realised that road was leading nowhere."
My Kidnapper, directed by Mark Henderson and Kate Horne, is released in selected cinemas on 11 February and broadcast on More 4 at 10pm on 22 February.