Lisa JacksonThe Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo was screened last week at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, and was greeted with sincere praises by a packed audience.

Emmy-Award winning filmmaker’s Lisa Jackson took questions at the end of the film, and explained how her own personal experience of being gang-raped in Washington, D.C., when she was 25 years old, helped her research and tell this terrible story.

The film was shot in the war-torn eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where tens of thousands of women and girls have been raped and tortured in the past decade. Used as a true weapon of war in this brutal resource conflict, systematic rape is perpetrated on a daily basis by soldiers from foreign militias, rebel groups, and the Congolese army.

A still from The Greatest Silence: Rape in the CongoJackson’s goal is to shatter the wall of silence the surrounds these acts, a task hindered by the remoteness of the region but also by what looks like an explicit connivance. She said, “I think that what feels like a conspiracy of silence in the world media is allowing this plunder to continue without allowing/forcing us to consider our complicity in the whole catastrophe.”

Eastern DRC — an immense territory the size of Western Europe — is rich in natural resources such as diamonds, copper, cobalt, and above all coltan, used in the fabrication of electronic components for computers and mobile phones.

“Coltan is not like blood diamonds,” Jackson said. “It is something that none of us can live without - it is in all our cellphones, laptops, remote controls. Diamonds are a luxury…but owning these electronic devices, for most of us, is not an option - our very functioning in a modern world depends on them.”

A still from The Greatest Silence: Rape in the CongoIn her graphic and extremely powerful film — produced in association with HBO Documentary Films and the Fledgling Fund — Jackson leads a brave and determined investigation. She interviews activists, United Nation peacekeepers, local physicians, and even the indifferent rapists belonging to the Congolese Army. She also gives voice to dozens of rape survivors who, with touching honesty, provide the most sensitive and precise accounts of their tragedy.

“I was surprised by the connections I felt with the survivors I met, the shared experiences of guilt and shame that burden so many women who have been raped,” Jackson remembered. “It’s fascinating, and horrifying, the universality of the stigmas that attach.  It’s never easy revisiting a nightmare, but I felt that if I asked another woman to go there, I had to too.”

A still from The Greatest Silence: Rape in the CongoThe Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo will be broadcast in the US on Home Box Office (HBO) Tuesday, April 8th at 10:00 pm EST. More information about the film, and how to purchase a copy, can be found on Women Make Movies’ Web site.

Human Rights Watch is an international research and advocacy organization that works today in more than 70 countries, from which it writes accurate and often damning reports on humanitarian crises and human rights abuses to lobby governments and the media. Since 1988 Human Rights Watch organizes its acclaimed International Film Festival, with annual, week-long seasons of independent films that are shown in venues in New York and London, now in their 20th and 12th editions respectively.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 11:03 am and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.