From Women Make Movies:
A survivor of gang rape herself, Emmy-Award® winning filmmaker Lisa F. Jackson travels through the DRC to understand what is happening and why. This award-winning documentary features interviews with activists, physicians, even the indifferent rapists who are soldiers of the Congolese Army. But the most moving moments of this film come as dozens of survivors recount their stories with pulverizing honesty and detail, providing inspiring examples of resistance, courage and grace.
Women Make Movies is proud to be distributing THE GREATEST SILENCE: RAPE IN THE CONGO and we invite you to tune in to the national broadcast premiere, April 8 at 10pm on HBO.
The national broadcast of this powerful documentary offers an unprecedented opportunity to break the silence that surrounds this urgent, serious issue. THE GREATEST SILENCE: RAPE IN THE CONGO also provides a way to discuss violence against women as a global issue, a human rights violation affecting women throughout the world.
Looks like it will be great, I don’t have cable so I hope a few good lengthy reviews will be written. I hope projects like these will serve to highlight the full scope of the atrocities taking place there and in other places in the world, most Americans dont seem to care at all, even if you push one of their own hotbutton issues such as the rapes and degradation in this doc or the fact that some of the rapists in this country are most definitely ten, eleven or twelve year old boys forcefully taken into the army and who will die in the thousands or tens of thousands. So much going on, so much to be done, hopefully this program will serve as one small step of many till we all wake the heck up.
[...] feminism and rape issues, as well as basic human rights issues, to tune into HBO tonight at 10. The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo will investigate the sexual violence committed against women in the DCR. It is going to be [...]
Okay, I know it’s just started, but I’m already worried.
Did this documentary maker think about the psychological consequences of getting women to tell gut-wrenching stories about rape in front of a camera for our Western education? Is she prepared to provide support for any psychological trauma induced by the telling of these experiences?
I am also worried about how the filmmaker brings her own personal story into this: “I told the Congolese woman that I also blamed myself when I was raped…in Georgetown.” Is it okay to equate rape deployed as a weapon of war with the rape of a woman in Georgetown with access to the American judicial system?
My most pressing question: Is this documentary going to portray Congolese women as passive, monolithic, universal victims without agency? Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes about what she calls a tendency among Western writers, scholars, and filmmakers to produce what she calls reproductions of the “Third World Woman.” Mohanty’s point is not that we shouldn’t talk about things like rape in the DRC, but that we should be cautious about producing images of women who are monolithically oppressed and fundamentally worse off than Western women. And that we should be cautious and critical of the privilege we wield when addressing issues such as rape in the DRC.
Just preliminary concerns. I haven’t really decided what I think of the documentary yet.
Kristin–
I just finished the film, and while I could understand your concerns, she def. took precautions in getting their permission to film and for them to talk. Also, it is an interesting point you bring up about “Third World Women;” that was a chief concern of mine too–well, seeing as she also shows women who are enacting their own agency–whether it be police work, medical work, support groups, or spiritual guidance–I think that helps work against the Third World Women stereotype.
I was also a little concerned about the blending of her story with it. But, let’s be honest, what happened to Lisa was horrible–just because it happened under so-called “better circumstances” does make somehow better. I doubt when those three men were raping her, she was thinking “ah, well, I don’t have it so bad, at least I’m not in the Congo!” I think that when we start to call one rape “worse” than another, we are in danger of undermining one another’s experience. I do not want to devalue Lisa’s experience simply because she is a white woman raped in Georgetown. Rather, we have to think about them differnetly, as opposed to comparing them. Why did what happened to Lisa happen at all? Why does this crime against the women of the DCR continue to happen? Not: why is this woman talking about her expiernce, she should be ashamed since she is facing women who have it much worse off!
When we start to compare victims, then devalue and trivialize their experiences, then we are falling right into the traps set for us by the patriarchy.
Kacie, I agree with this. I wasn’t trying to give the impression of comparing them–only saying that it is problematic to conflate them as “the same experience” which I thought the woman did repeatedly (a second time when she was speaking before the group of women to talk to them about her story).
Now that I’ve watched the entire documentary, I would say that: I think this film is important but also highly problematic.
One of my other big concerns is that I think the filmmaker presented the conflict in a problematically ahistorical and decontextualized way. Although she gives a very facile explanation of what happened during colonialism, she doesn’t sufficiently talk about the roles of the international community, as well as of other countries (besides mentioning the fact that Hutus are committing atrocities in the DRC.). I think this is a problem because it perpetuates racist stereotypes about the volatile, inexplicable, and uniquely dangerous nature of African conflicts. (Mahmood Mamdani is one of the most helpful scholars I know in demystifying some of these conflicts.)
I definatly fully agree with your last point. I wish she would have spoke more about colonilaztion and the context of the war, as opposed to a flimsy explaination. I think the Western perception of Afrcian conflicts is one of the reasons this sort of thing happens with few people stepping in. Oh, and of course, the racial implications as well.
I guess when it came to her story, I thought she was using it mostly to gain the women’s trust in talking with her, that she was someone who went trhgouh a similar horror. Maybe that’s another reason I wasn’t so bothered by it. She seemed pretty humble through the documentary, did not dwell on her experience to the extent I expected. I get really agravated when filmmakers use documentaries to “find themselves.”
I was both horrifed and humbled by the documentary…horrified at the sheer brutality on these women and humbled by their grace. All governments in the world share in the atrocities documented in this film… I then read the bill sending $52 million a year the last two years to the DCR for the women..where is that money? I am not a proponent of violence, but I say give those women something with which to defend themselves and their children….a gun. Rhetoric over which rape was worse..is only rhetoric.
Fantastic program, a definite must-see.