The 2015 Opening Night film of the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival (HRAFF) isn’t following the standard model. The HRAFF could’ve chosen something crowd-pleasing, like the high-school-kids-do-hospice tearjerker, Beginning With The End, or any of its films – Colombian skater-kid drama Los Hongos, or the music-as-resistance rockumentaries Sumé: The Sound Of A Revolution and Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock & Roll – each with a banging soundtrack.
"Women are effectively discouraged from talking about rape in their community. Culturally, that’s how it has been for a long time."
Instead, HRAFF will screen I Will Not Be Silenced, a local documentary chronicling the legal battle of Australian aid-worker Charlotte Campbell Stephen, who fought for seven years in Kenyan courts to bring the men who raped her to justice. The film will be followed by a Q&A discussing Stephen’s story and the global battle against sexual violence. “I make no apologies that I Will Not Be Silenced is not an easy view,” says director Judy Rymer. “There’s some tough things in there: the frustrations that Charlotte feels are the frustrations of those around her, the frustrations of the storyteller and the frustrations of the audience. It’s no one’s idea of light viewing, but it tells a very difficult, important story, and I’m both impressed and seriously delighted that the [HRAFF] has chosen it to be screened on Opening Night.”
When Rymer first began filming Stephen, she was already deep into her legal battle, decrying the Kenyan court system that was continually delaying proceedings due to defence council prevarications. Rymer thought, at that time, there was an end in sight; her and producer Lois Harris budgeting for a year-and-a-half’s filming on-the-ground in Kenya. Instead, it became a four-year odyssey, balancing Stephen’s arduous legal ordeal with her work as an advocate for local victims of rape, who have long been threatened and shamed into silence. “There was a social element that was indivisible from Charlotte’s story. We were making something that could be useful for women in Kenya. Women are effectively discouraged from talking about rape in their community. Culturally, that’s how it has been for a long time. But you can feel that things are starting to change, that there’s a lot of activity in Kenya now, particularly in Nairobi, about matters of sexual violence and rape.”
And though Rymer is proud that the Chief Justice of Kenya, Dr Willy Mutunga, recently screened I Will Not Be Silenced for 400 Kenyan judges as part of a push for legal reform, she sees her film as being bigger than a regional story. “My motivation was to talk about rape as a universal problem and not a black African one. There is the aspect of advocacy with the film. I do think it’s important for people to see these kinds of abuses of other people’s human rights and compare them to their own, because we all have them in our countries.”
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