Sexual assault remains the most hidden and the fastest growing crime in the world, and in South Africa the statistics are staggering. Two days before Christmas in 1988, Cathy Henkel’s 59 year-old mother Laura was sexually assaulted and brutally bashed in her home in Johannesburg, South Africa by a local white teenager. Although Laura identified her attacker from a school photograph, the man was never charged, and remained free. For fourteen years, unable to recover, Laura Henkel retreated from her family and rejected contact with the outside world. In an attempt to help her mother heal, filmmaker Cathy Henkel took matters into her own hands, returned to Johannesburg and confronted her mother's attackers. What begins as a powerful exploration about the unsolved case of Laura Henkel's rape becomes a gripping revelation about the healing process. THE MAN WHO STOLE MY MOTHER'S FACE is an intimate look at the long-term effects of rape and a profoundly moving account of one family's quest for truth.