you teach us, very early on,

what not to talk about, what not to confront, or name.

that it will always be our fault, that we ask for it,

as property – for correction, punishment, love, shame, revenge,

your violence is how we must be tamed.

who we are, how we dress, what we eat, where we go, whom we desire,

the feebleness of our no, our consent.                     

that not behaving suitably victim-like or speaking only when we feel ready,

makes us unworthy of being believed, undeserving of justice, a disgraced body.

but despite you, your powers, your systems,

drawing on the resolve of those before us who spoke up, fought hard, and relentlessly,

we strive to find our voice, our language, our community,

and when we do, we speak up, one at a time, all at a time,

and break the silence,

to resist, persist, survive.

​

Seeking stories, impressions, testimonies and ruminations on speaking up, navigating, coping, surviving, healing and making sense of, through and beyond, the enduring traumas of sexual violence.

 

These films aim to strengthen feminist efforts towards disempowering the cultures and silences around sexual violence, recognising the varied, subjective and deeply complex experiences, contexts, choices and lived realities of victims and survivors, while chronicling their journeys, challenges, vulnerabilities and resilience. We strive to create a record of our existence and resistance in a world that dehumanises, hypersexualises, flattens, dismisses and trivialises the manifestations of rampant everyday violence against women, and increasingly against trans and queer persons, especially those at the intersections of multiple marginalisations of caste, class, religion, dis/ability, age, region, ethnicity and work. The films will offer reflections on the myriad everyday patriarchal structures and ways in which sexism, misogyny, impunity and shame are produced and perpetuated - by families, communities, popular culture, legal discourses and the state, acknowledging acts of sexual violence not as incidental aberrations, but as deeply embedded, intentional and structural crimes of patriarchy, which, across their many forms, locations, histories and perversities, are always acts of power.

 

We have all been there. One occasion after another, trying to make sense of the events, the metaphors, the memories of sexual violence on our bodies and beings, working tirelessly against their active denial by the very systems in which they are conferred particular meanings, condoned and normalised. The possibility of sexual violence seamlessly permeates every nook and corner of our private and public lives, every day, every moment. These routine encounters are fundamentally mediated by our location in the world – our violability in the hierarchy of bodies that matter, whether they deserve to be safeguarded, against what, from whom and to salvage whose honour, individual and community. The prescriptions of patriarchy determine the limits of our autonomy; sanction abuse and harm – most often by those known to us; insist we forget; define the moralistic language of shame and silence in which we can speak, if at all; the remedies we can seek; access to law, justice, care, healing and closure and what our experiences should mean to us. Survivors remain fiercely on trial, subject to repeated institutionalised erosion and humiliation commensurate to our ascriptive identities, forced to carry the burden of blame, while perpetrators, and thereby the complicit systems that create men who rape, are absolved of accountability through the refuge of atypical individual monstrosity.

 

Mainstream discourses erase the evidence of the lives, voices and arduous journeys of victims and survivors - the attempts to cope; access to resources; navigating pain, guilt, doubt and isolation; striving for the chance to be heard, to be believed; to claim dignity, safety, belonging, meaning and personhood. These everyday moments and realities are obscured by the sensationalism and spectacle created around select instances that each time seem to register as a first-ever shock in collective memory, followed per script by patronising platitudes, protectionist rhetoric, empty slogans and shrill, callous conservative campaigns demanding death for the perpetrator, invoking honour and retribution.

 

We seek to support compelling films inspired by the imperative to listen, believe, share, bear witness, stand in solidarity and empower the ownership of transformative language and agency, recording, with nuance, depth and texture, difficult, uncomfortable, terrifying, confusing and hopeful experiences, rituals of mending and repair and intimate, complex negotiations - not as statistics, triumphant heroes or living corpses, but as real people, who, despite being scarred by acts, memories and consequences of violence, are wholesome individuals, defined by more than our trauma. The films will add to the body of work that gives voice and space to the always ongoing, slow, uneven, non-linear, untidy, fragmented labour and journeys of survival and how they shape us in big and small ways, as we rebuild our lives and find courage, catharsis and joy.

 

They will encourage contemplation on the meanings and mechanisms of consent, trauma, impunity, recovery and hope, deriving from long histories of sustained and intense feminist engagements that have enabled a steady continuum of varied conversations, diverse perspectives, affirmative interventions and moments of heightened attention to widespread sexual violence by multiple individual and institutional actors.

 

Through these films we affirm our right to speak up, stay silent, defend our testimonies, come together in our pursuit of dignity and justice, find each other and speak in languages that are our own. We explore how our experiences, challenging and liberating, can find acknowledgment and creative expression, recovering our selves and our struggles, to expose, confront and disrupt the cultures that make it difficult, painful and impossible to talk and keep us from being who we are, reclaiming not just our stories but especially how we choose to tell them.