2013 Oscar Week: Academy Documentaries: People’s Stories, Men’s Voices

Guest post written by Jo Custer.
The lifecycle of documentaries aspiring to global visibility begins each year at Sundance mid-January and ends in December when Oscar nomination voting begins. Of the five nominated this year, four premiered quietly at Robert Redford’s House of Docs, while The Gatekeepers — a series of interviews with former heads of Shin Bet, Israel’s NSA and CIA in one — slipped into the running even more quietly via Telluride, after its Jerusalem debut. 
Film writers often tout the launching success of the year’s first Academy qualifying festival and can even present bias which may be attributable to the competition structure, as the Wall Street Journal did when it printed that Kirby Dick’s expose on the treatment of military rape victims, The Invisible War, would be one to watch but overlooked How to Survive a Plague, David France’s long, slow grip on the fight to normalize healthcare for AIDS victims. Both nominees were in the U.S. documentary competition. Only one of the WSJ‘s picks for Sundance-projected success came from the world cinema documentary competition, and it wasn’t Searching for Sugarman, Malik Bendjelloul’s bizarre tale of a Detroit singer/songwriter who recorded two flop albums and then quietly became a demi-god in apartheid-era South Africa. Nor was it 5 Broken Cameras, in which Guy Davidi chronicles Palestinian Emad Burnat’s inability to keep a camera operational in the suffocating presence of the Israeli Army.
Without conflating the already hard to separate issues of press-generated success vs. Oscar-generated success, this year’s most monetarily rewarding mark of honor has drawn five films. That’s five films from a pool that increases yearly at a hard-to-measure growth rate. When Sundance first created the House of Docs in 1999, theatrical releases of non-fiction films represented less than two percent of all releases, according to figures collected from Box Office Mojo. Since 2001 non-fiction theatrical releases have grown, sometimes doubling or tripling in a year until in 2011 documentaries comprised 18% of all films released.
Coinciding with the growing interesting in non-narrative film, there has been a noticeable uptick in women documentarians as well. Dozens can be found in lists of 2012 docs to watch that didn’t make the Oscar list, including Amy Berg (West of Memphis), Alison Klayman (Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry), Katie Dellamaggiore (Brooklyn Castle), Lauren Greenfield (The Queen of Versailles), Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Detropia, Jesus Camp), Susan Froemke (ESCAPE FIRE: The Fight to Rescue American Health Care), and Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush (Finding North). U.S. women represented fifty percent of documentarians at Sundance last year while international women documentarians were outnumbered eleven to four.
Disregarding for a moment whatever else the relationship between these numbers might suggest, two things continue to happen. First, despite the rise in the number of docs which garner theatrical releases, their box office revenues remain low, short-term. Second, the one body with the power to make a filmmaker’s career in the short term — the Academy — continues to play it safe in its selection of documentaries to bring into the limelight. What makes this year’s lineup incredibly hard to argue against isn’t the documentaries themselves, but rather what they represent: a carefully balanced melange of social justice issues, most of which effect women, but all of which were brought about by the storytelling devices of men.
The Invisible War
The most salient of these to American audiences, Kirby Dick, took on the U.S. military in The Invisible War, in defense of thousands of rape victims across all branches who are silenced far more often than their offenders are brought to justice. Dick began his David vs. Goliath track record with This Film Is Not Yet Rated, taking on the MPAA with an honesty that everyone but the ratings body itself cared about. According to the action kicker just before the credits, Defense Secretary Leon Pannetta disallowed commanding officers to govern processing for rape victims two days after seeing the film, which notes that officers aren’t just getting away with rape but learning how to maneuver the justice system before returning to civilian life with no record of being a sex offender. Hard-hitting and hard to watch, the film seems to have done part of its job. Perhaps more importantly to the Academy, it is the token women’s film this year. Not all victims of military rape are female, of course, but this was the year of the War On Women. Apparently, Kirby Dick’s take on that will serve as our commemoration.
How to Survive a Plague
Perhaps less salient — if only because memories are short — David France’s long-suffering piecing together of how gay men and lesbians banded together under a retired chemist and housewife to learn about AIDS and how to fight it rings truer to its subjects’ voices. Opening in “Year 6 of the Epidemic” in Greenwich Village, the epicenter of the plague, it tells the story the networks kept from the news each night of Reagan’s presidency. There were no drugs to treat the disease. People were being turned away. It was nearly one hundred percent fatal. People who were dying anyway laid down in the streets to protest and be arrested and went the opposite way of the closet eventually — away from the black market and into the realm of FDA tested, prescribable drugs. Archival footage from dozens of sources make this authentic look at what it means to be an activist layered but also fatiguing, as though France wants the viewer to feel the malaise of too many years of dying and not nearly enough justifying. Just as notable, the camera never gets too close to the women. It’s a men’s story, in the end. 
Searching for Sugarman
Another absorbing and visceral man’s story is Searching for Sugarman, which surprises and delights in its juxtaposition of two very different climes — Detroit in 1968 – 1971 and South Africa at the height of apartheid. The “Sugarman” of interest is none other than Rodriguez, whose career never really got out of the studio in North America. But his first album made its way to South Africa and got copied and redistributed and bought in such demand that he became, according to figures in the film, bigger than Elvis or The Rolling Stones. His music inspired a censorship sick society to rally behind music and a movement that eventually won. Filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul left Sweden to globe-trot and stumbled across the Rodriguez story while in South Africa. Considering how uplifting the storytelling is, he chose well.
5 Broken Cameras
In 5 Broken Cameras, Guy Davidi remains the silent silent director while Emad Burnat tells the story of his life in Palestine since the Israelis began encroaching actively upon his community and house and life. Showing footage from each of Emad’s cameras interstitially but linearly, it attempts to avoid the macrocosm argument of whose land it is by focusing on the microcosm but never quite makes it. The Israeli Army demonstrates its displeasure with Palestine time and time again, tearing up olive trees and soil for no other reason than its being there. Its most effective moment comes in a little seen glimpse of Islamic married life, in which Emad’s wife, beyond tired of her husband’s preoccupation with the distance the lens gives him, yells at him to turn off the camera while she performs domestic duties, but he does not. He can’t, not even when he is placed under house arrest. He films himself doing nothing because filming is what he does. Very heavy on the imagery of Emad’s son, it is another man’s story — set on the most unstable ground in the world, and still often seen as the center of it.
The Gatekeepers
Almost as if to be fair to the uprooters of innocent olive trees, the Academy also nominated Dror Moreh’s The Gatekeepers, which I did not get a chance to see thanks to a limited release and a tight grip on screeners. It features interviews with six former heads (all men) of Shin Bet, the “unseen shield” of Israel — a far more authoritarian point of view than Emad’s.
It seems more than safe to say that the Academy may have been influenced politically to seek a balance in representing both sides of an ongoing conflict. But safety was ever the problem with this year’s documentary lineup: A “women’s issue” delivered by a well-respected man during the War on Women; a pleaser for the LGBTIQ community who showed up a little less strong in this year’s Presidential election, but still showed; a token non-issue entertainment piece that also happens to shine in its unusualness; and two pieces from the Middle East. Under Academy auspices, docs play like little more than complementary copy.
In case you were wondering, Sugarman has my bet for best doc of the year. As does women’s continuation to make social justice documentaries for almost no monetary return, but rather making names for themselves that will last. Hopefully it will rub off in the darker places, too.
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Jo Custer is a New Orleans writer/director/producer, theatre director, blogger and sometimes a journo. She has just finished auditions for her next short film, Sonuvabitch, gearing up to shoot this May and will also be directing The Four of Us for the stage this spring. You can follow her sojourns as a filmmaker/cab driver here: http://jocuster.wordpress.com/

Women-Centric Films Opening Today, 6/22

Well, only 2 female-centric films this week. Pretty sad. BUT! The two films — Pixar’s first female protagonist a feisty archer and an award-winning documentary about rape in the military — both look fantastic.

Brave

Merida is a skilled archer and impetuous daughter of King Fergus (Billy Connolly) and Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson). Determined to carve her own path in life, Merida defies an age-old custom sacred to the uproarious lords of the land: massive Lord MacGuffin (Kevin McKidd), surly Lord Macintosh (Craig Ferguson) and cantankerous Lord Dingwall (Robbie Coltrane). Merida’s actions inadvertently unleash chaos and fury in the kingdom, and when she turns to an eccentric old Witch (Julie Walters) for help, she is granted an ill-fated wish. The ensuing peril forces Merida to discover the meaning of true bravery in order to undo a beastly curse before it’s too late. — (C) Disney

 The Invisible War

The Invisible War is a groundbreaking investigative documentary about one of our country’s most shameful and best kept secrets: the epidemic of rape within our US military. Today, a female soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire with the number of assaults in the last decade alone in the hundreds of thousands. Focusing on the powerfully emotional stories of several young women, the film reveals the systemic cover up of the crimes against them and follows their struggles to rebuild their lives and fight for justice. The Invisible War features hard-hitting interviews with high-ranking military officials and members of Congress that reveal the perfect storm conditions that exist for rape in the military, its history of cover-up, and what can be done to bring about much needed change. — (C) Official Site

All film descriptions taken from Rotten Tomatoes.

‘The Invisible War’ Takes on Sexual Assault in the Military

This is a guest post from Soraya Chemaly.
How many movies have you watched in which rape is a notable, if not integral, part of the plot? Not sure? Well, I started thinking about it and poked around. The short list I compiled is at the end of this article.
Amazing, right? I personally have spent probably hundreds of dollars and entire weeks of my life paying for and watching these movies. Given the list below, it is clear that we do not shy away from movies in which jarring and often graphic rape scenes are featured. The most recent and extraordinarily explicit example, of course, is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. War movies, in particular, often feature or allude to rape. Indeed, militarism and sexual violence seem to go hand in hand — but we don’t usually think of the rape being intra-military. In addition, these films are almost always fictional, edifying tales of retribution that leave audiences entertained and emotionally satisfied. But what about real rape — especially rape in the military?
You don’t see any blockbusters on the list about that. So, in return for the hours of entertainment pleasure that you may have derived from some of these films, take just two minutes and watch this:
The Invisible War, which premiered at The Sundance Film Festival on January 20th, is a groundbreaking investigative documentary about one of our country’s most shameful and best kept secrets: the epidemic of rape within our military. Focusing on the powerfully emotional stories of several young women, the film reveals the systemic failure of the military to confront these crimes and follows their struggles to fight for justice.
In 2009, 16,150 service members were assaulted (addition details for service academies can be found here at Stop Military Rape.) Although both men and women are subject to assault, women in the military are now more likely to be raped by fellow soldiers than they are to be killed in combat. In a 2005 study of 540 female veterans, 30 percent reported assaulted by a male colleague and/or supervisor. Of these, 14 percent reported having been gang-raped and 20 percent reported having been raped more than once.
Estimates indicate that anywhere from 8 percent to as high as 37 percent of the victims of sexual assault and trauma cases reported last year were men. The Pentagon believes that fully 80-90 percent of assaults (of men and women) are not reported. Only 1 in 15 men report assault, versus 1 in 5 women. It is harder for service men (and civilians), who face the real risk and consequences of being stigmatized as weak and “not masculine” to report assault. In this way, the military is a sluggish, tradition-bound, concentrated distillation of prevailing cultural norms. The portrayal of rape in the media and our culture at large (everything from victim-blaming to exaggerated claims of false accusations) contributes to the difficulty of getting accurate information about men being victimized. Sexism, misogyny and hetero-normative standards result in rape being largely understood as forcible vaginal penetration of a woman by a man. Trigger warning for this link: “Rape [for a man] is a very emasculating thing,” says Rick Tringale, who was the target of a military gang rape and came forward with his story.
This is compounded in the military, which values and demands uber-masculinity and for which “male” aggression is vital to survival. Don’t forget, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was in place until one year ago. Until we have a broader cultural acceptance (not just in the military) of the link between homophobia and misogyny, male abuse will continue to be under-reported, ignored and misunderstood. Ironically, it is the addition of more women into military service that has allowed men to come forward in greater numbers every year.
Military survivors of assault report several additional factors in explaining their reluctance to come forward.
Sexual assault is is deeply traumatizing and stigmatizing for any victim, but for military survivors of assault the effects can be significantly worse. In the first place, they cannot quit their jobs but instead have to continue working with their rapists, sleeping with their rapists, eating with their rapists, being “led” by their rapists and, in many cases, protect their rapists from harm and expect them to do the same. Given the power dynamics, sometimes the closest analogy is parental rape of a child.
Military Sexual Trauma is the Department of Veterans Affairs’ term for the effect of intra-service sexual assault or repeated, threatening sexual harassment on a veteran. Survivors suffer higher rates of PTSD, anxiety, depression, increased risk of homelessness and alcohol and substance abuse. Female military personnel report getting pregnant (some are raped while pregnant), having to find difficult to access abortifacients and often starting birth control to prevent the possibility of pregnancy in the face of the high likelihood that they will raped again. This is an environment where female service members sleep with knives to protect themselves from their fellow soldiers.
Yet another intensifier is the military’s handling of rape claims. Here is a particularly troubling description of a rape and how it was handled:

Beth, a major in the U. S. Army Reserve, was sexually assaulted by a noncommissioned officer during a scud missile attack during Operation Iraqi Freedom. She followed reporting procedures, including undergoing the collection of evidence during another scud missile attack. Emergency contraception (EC) was “simply handed to me as a lot of pills to take. I went on birth control pills in the event that this happened to me again.”

Even recent changes in The Defense Department’s military rape policies have been criticized by both Protect Our Defenders and the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN) as insufficient.
What happens when people report this crime?
Only 8 percent of rape complaints get prosecuted, only 2 percent result in conviction. This isn’t a slap on the wrist — it’s a slap in the face to victims: 80 percent of perpetrators and the accused are discharged with honor, while 90 percent of victims are eventually “involuntarily” discharged. (In the general population conviction rates are 40 percent for prosecuted and 6 percent for all cases reported.)
The military chain of command has a vested interest in not escalating complaints. Unit commanders’ depend on obedience, harmony and cohesion — all of which are threatened by soldiers’ accusing other soldiers of assault and the fallout of those accusations. There is no incentive to resolve complaints legally and systematically in ways that will enter the official record. It means paperwork, investigations, dishonor, admission of responsibility, a loss of reputation and possibly rank.
In November, 2011 California Congresswoman Jackie Speier introduced the Sexual Assault Training Oversight and Prevention Act–the STOP Act, H.R. 3435, which would take the reporting, oversight and investigation of these cases away from the military’s normal chain of command and into the jurisdiction of the the newly created, autonomous (civilian and military expert) Sexual Assault Oversight and Response Office.
In February of 2011 a landmark lawsuit was filed on behalf of 17 active duty service members and veterans, 2 men and 15 women. It accused the Department of Defense of cultivating a culture that fails to prevent and prosecute rape and sexual assault, violating plaintiffs’ constitutional rights. The case named Robert M. Gates and Donald Rumsfeld as heads of institutions that trivialized, denied, openly mocked the claims of rape victims and failed to take preventive measures to stop further assaults. This landmark case was dismissed last December.
Lawyer Susan Burke filed an appeal for the case in early January (2012). The plaintiffs in this case are 28 current or former members of the military who allege that they were raped by coworkers and, similarly to the above cited case, that the defense secretary’s failure to act on the issue of sexual assault in the military amounts to a violation of their constitutional rights.
Some people feel that talking about these rapes, prosecuting them and seeking legal recourse weakens our military. It is the exact opposite. The persistent drumbeat of denial and blithe dismissal is dangerous and harmful. Not revealing, admitting and fixing the problem of rape in the military, and our culture at large, is what undermines cohesion and hurts soldiers.
“We will continue the legal battles until the military begins to punish and dishonorably discharge the sexual predators, rather than retaliate against those who report the crime,” explains Burke.
As far as I’m concerned, one rape is too much. I know, pie in the sky for some people — but a matter of life and death for others. From my perspective, it’s a shame we can’t sue our entire culture since, in actuality, the military’s rape statistics aren’t that radically different from the nation’s.
You can follow the release of the movie at @Invisible_War or check out the Take Action list on The Invisible War website.
Movies That Include Rape and Sexual Assault
This is a short list of movies in which rape occurs. I couldn’t even begin to compile a list in which rape is implied or threatened. Multiple iterations of IMBD searches consistently resulted in anywhere between 2,000-4,500 titles, depending on whether or not you included TV. Interestingly enough, however, some of the movies that involve the assault of boys and men did not appear on the first pass list of movies including rape.
9 ½ weeks
The Accused
American Psycho
The Astronaut’s Wife
Bastard Out of Carolina
Blue Velvet
Cape Fear
Cider House Rules
Clan of the Cave Bear
Clockwork Orange
The Color Purple
Dead Man Walking
Death and the Maiden
Deathwish I, II and II
Deliverance
Devil’s Advocate
Eve’s Bayou
Eye’s Wide Shut
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Forrest Gump
The General’s Daughter
Gia
G. I. Jane
Gladiator
God and Monsters
The Good Girl
The Green Mile
Last Tango in Paris
Lawrence of Arabia
Lolita
Moulin Rouge
Once We Were Warriors
Platoon
Precious
Pulp Fiction
Rob Roy
Robin Hood
Saturday Night Fever
Schindler’s List
Shame
The Shipping News
Thelma and Louise
Traffic

Soraya Chemaly writes feminist satire. She is a regular contributor to The Good Men Project and The Huffington Post (where this piece originally appeared). She is also the creator of the retired blogs: Poog, a Goop Spoof and The Guide to Manic Moms.