Leonore Schick’s TTIP&Feminist Film Saturday

For more on the Feminist Film Fest, check out filmmaker and Leonore Schick’s blog article...

"The London Feminist Film Festival

It Happened Here
trigger warning: sexual assault, sexual violence, rape.

Initially, I only planned to go along to the Shorts screening. But my friend Emma who does the Resonance radio show with me said we should go along to a documentary about rape on US campuses. I said yes, and met her at the Rio Cinema in Dalston.

The film is called It Happened Here. Here’s the trailer. It is a 76 minute documentary – I mention the amount of minutes because those were more or less the amount of minutes I was crying for. It was so upsetting. I mentioned this to Emma later that day and she said, yeah, but they group together and become friends and sue. But somehow that fact didn’t make me feel any less depressed.

Later that day, I wished I could have unseen what I’d seen – especially the parts where women were on camera speaking in a way that seemed like they were pleased to be victim blaming – the sort of, if you don’t want to get raped, don’t drink alcohol, don’t have male friends, if sexual assault really was happening that much, there wouldn’t be co-education. That footage was the most harrowing for me.

But the film followed activists, and their journey to try and take the universities to account for ignoring or not dealing with the rape allegations. And Emma was right, ultimately, as she usually is – there were inspiring parts to the films. The activists were taking concrete legal steps to change the system, to get their universities to change. They settled a court case against one university for $1.3million...."

Read more here.