There’s this sense that we shouldn’t share our personal feelings and stories, either because it’s inappropriate or because others don’t care, but this is inaccurate. As persons, we are very much constituted by our experiences with others. We need others because it is in reference to them that our selves come to be. Humans are, after all, social creatures, and it is often in our greatest times of need that others come to our rescue, and it is with others, as the slogan “the personal is political” suggests, that we shall transcend our obstacles.

Lisa F. Jackson’s The Greatest Silence: Rape In The Congo is one filmmaker’s attempt to bring others together in an effort to foster change. It’s an exploration of rape as a tool of war. If one woman is raped, it devastates a family; if enough women are raped, it devastates an entire community. The act affects not only the victim, but those who exist within the victim’s web of significant others, with scars running deep enough to leave their mark on children and even children’s children. But in the same way that rape infects a person, so do stories of rape. To see The Greatest Silence is to become a carrier of a different sort of pathogen: knowledge. Knowledge is contagious, spreading from one person to another in the form of e-mails, conversations, links, screenings, etc., until change is affected. Silence may be deadly, but talk is redemptive and gives life to movement.

Ben Kharakh: How do you feel about the film at this point?

Lisa F. Jackson: I wish that the film were a relic of some now bygone history. I wish the film were no longer relevant. Every time I watch the film or talk about the film, I confront the reality that things on the ground haven’t changed in the Congo at all — in fact, they’ve gotten worse since the film was made.

BK: How did you feel watching the footage as you were editing it?

LFJ: The raw footage took a while to get translated and subtitled, but a lot of the interviews that I did in the Congo, I had a translator there sort of giving me suggestions of what people were saying, so to have it right there in front of me and with the letters on the screen, I was removed a little. The hardest part was listening in the first place and having direct eye contact with these women as they poured their hearts out to me. Doing that day after day after day was a tremendous emotional burden. I wept every day that I was in the Congo. The real shock was actually having the rapists subtitled — the soldiers — because when I was doing those interviews, I only got a rough idea from Bernard about what they were saying and, to tell you the truth, I was in some sort of zone where I was in a little bit of denial about being in the middle of The Bush with these kind of drunk guys with their guns. So when I actually looked at their faces on the screen and saw them looking at me, that was hard material to work with. It truly was difficult, and it still fills me with rage and loathing when I watch it.

BK: You could not understand directly what they were saying, but what did you pick up from the way that they spoke — just the tone and their cadence, for example?

LFJ: I got incredible arrogance — a sense that this was their right. There was a pridefulness and a preening sense of self-regard, and a sort of malevolence. They tried to intimidate me, but ultimately I knew that they very much wanted their 15 seconds of fame and that if anything were to happen to me or my camera, they wouldn’t get that, so I actually felt that the camera, while it wasn’t the equivalent of their guns, it was my protection. It definitely was my protection. And the fact that they truly did want to brag about what they had done was evident in just their posture and the way they spoke.

BK: Was it the fact that it would be a film that people would see that got many of them to give their interviews?

LFJ: Yeah, I think so. Nothing happens in the Congo without money. I gave everybody five dollars, but that was hardly the motivation. I think the motivation was to be seen, bragging about what they had done because they didn’t consider it a crime, and they definitely didn’t consider it a war crime, and they knew that they might have been confessing to unspeakable acts, but they would never be held accountable. And that was also a very hard moment, when the interviews were over and they just sort of melted back into the trees. I realized that I had videotaped soldiers confessing to war crimes and crimes against humanity, and I would never see them in court. They just disappeared, off to claim their next victims.

BK: In one of the interviews, one of the soldiers says that “all of this is happening because of the war, if there was no war…” Do you remember this part?

LFJ: Yes, the very beginning.

BK: Did he have more to say or did he just trail off?

LFJ: He sort of just trailed off. It was the feeblest excuse possible. Basically, he was blaming their behaviors on the deprivations of living in The Bush, and so he didn’t really show a great deal of insight into what was happening in this country. But no, that was kind of his statement.

BK: That makes me think of later when you had asked one of the soldiers if they were doing it because of power or sex, and the translator said, “These are complicated questions. He will not understand.” Might any of these soldiers have been able to answer such a question?

LFJ: I don’t think that they tend to be very self-reflective individuals, but it’s kind of understood that it is about power. These soldiers, they may have guns, but in a very real sense, they are powerless. The army is a pragmatic mess. There’s no chain of command; there’s no discipline. They don’t get paid, so they take out their frustrations on the population. Thy claim it’s about sex, but I think it’s more about power. That’s an interesting question that I really can’t answer. I’ve had men in screenings ask me about the soldiers, “Why do they do it? Why do men do these things?” and I say, “You’re a guy. You tell me.” But I can’t answer this, and I don’t think that they could either.

BK: There is a part where the women had asked you about your own experience with rape. They asked if there was a war to explain it and you said, “No, any woman can become a victim at any time.”

LFJ: That was an interesting moment. They were flummoxed that this had happened to me, and then the only way that they could understand that it had happened to me would be that there had been a war. They may be in The Bush, but they didn’t think that there had been a war in the United States in the last 25 years. The questions were just coming at me from every angle, but I almost wanted to launch into the war between the sexes or classes or between the races. That is always a subtext for so much violence in America. But they peppered me with questions. They wanted to know very specifically about what time of night, what was I doing, what was I wearing, where were the men, were they ever caught, did I get married, did my husband know… They were astonished that I didn’t have children. So there were a lot of cultural differences that were discussed in the hours before I talked to them individually, but I think it did a lot to bridge some of the cultural gaps. Gender trumps some differences, but it doesn’t trump everything. I think that helped them to trust me and to trust my motivations.

BK: How else did you establish connections with the women of Congo?

LFJ: The simple universal act of exchanging personal narrative. You’re simply telling them a story about your life and you’re asking them to tell you a story about their lives. It’s the simplest of connections and it’s the most profound of bonds. I told my story to all the women I interviewed because there were a couple of situations, especially in the village, where they would line up to talk to me. The need to tell their story was evident, and it was something that was closeted within their own community. Maybe they talked about it within a very close circle of other women who have experienced the same thing, but they didn’t have therapists and they definitely could not talk about it with their husbands. And that’s if their husbands were even still around. It was thought of as something that should be hidden. The ability to talk to somebody who would listen to them without any judgment and with sympathy was, for many of them, a new experience.

BK: In what capacity did they exchange their stories before your film?

LFJ: Not in public. The portraits that I filmed of the women were after the church service — they met every other Sunday, and I had a sense that it was a very private thing. Outsiders weren’t welcome; men definitely weren’t welcome. In all of the villages that I went to, finding something like that was very, very unusual, but they saw the therapeutic benefits of sharing pain and coming together around what they had all experienced.

BK: What sort of solidarity did you see between the women?

LFJ: A lot of these communities that I went to were villages full of women and their children. The men were either at war, dead, or drinking beer in lawn chairs by the side of the road. I rarely saw men working fields with the women. I never saw men doing any sort of childcare or cooking. There was an incredible solidarity with the women in terms of sharing what food they had, sharing child caring duties…and also, when a woman would lose a husband, other families would absorb some of the children that she couldn’t feed.

BK: After attending that meeting, you had said, “That night I couldn’t sleep, and for weeks had nightmares about men with guns. ” I imagine you didn’t plan for how emotionally draining the experience would be. How did that affect your time there?

LFJ: I didn’t arrive there thinking, “Oh, this is a bucolic paradise where everybody is happy,” but the deeper I got into the reality of life on the ground for people, the more I couldn’t even look at the landscape, let alone anything else, without seeing some sort of heartbreak. Here the women are so beautiful and they’re suffering so. The men can turn on them in a second, and who really can they trust?

BK: What was life like for you after leaving the Congo?

LFJ: It has pretty much consumed me for about three years. I came away from there with such a profound sense of obligation to these women that had shared with me their worst nightmare, and I felt obligated to make people listen to that and make people react, and make people do something. Even though it’s a film that’s just fraught with deep sadness, there is still, I think, a hopefulness that the women still come together, they still help each other. And then there are those brave souls, like the policewoman and others who are working to help them, and you have the sense that all is not lost because of the dignity, grace, and resilience of the women. I hope that this film conveys some of that, because otherwise, it’s just a pretty relentless summer. So I not only wanted to convey the profundity of their experience, but also the truth about their souls, which you know, are just vibrant and keep going in the midst of things that would bring most of us to our knees.

BK: Was there a moment that you felt hopeless?

LFJ: There were lots of moments. Just spending a day in the recovery ward at a hospital made me think about what their lives would be like after their surgeries — the hours and days and weeks they have to lie on their backs. Most of them can’t read, so there’s no distraction. What is going on over and over and over in their minds? One of the towns I visited was a village of raped women. There are hundreds of them, in all states of repair and disrepair. Twelve-year-old girls who the doctors can’t perform adequate surgery on because they haven’t grown enough, so they wear diapers. Hopelessness. There definitely were those moments. But the overall feeling, coming back this last time, and seeing that some change has occurred… One hospital I had visited had a new wing with eight new surgical theaters installed. And my beloved Clotild, the nun in the little village, I managed to get her some cash the last time I was there and also introduced her to this wonderful NGO, and with my funds and their funds, she built a small school. She got a small soap-making factory, she has a little clinic with three beds and dispenses aspirin and things for the women, and built transitional housing for 27 women and their families who have been displaced by war and sexual violence. So I had the sense that it wasn’t that hopeless. It was pretty bad, but it wasn’t that lost.

BK: The UN had also passed a resolution saying that rape was a tool of war, and your film was one of the catalysts for that.

LFJ: Yes, the US Ambassador to the UN had seen the film and was inspired to sponsor the resolution, and he told me so to my face. Yeah, it recognizes rape as a destabilizing force that destroys families, it destroys communities, and it threatens the security of nations. By acknowledging it as a security issue, it takes it a notch above a humanitarian issue, which brings in medical supplies. A security issue means you bring in troops and guns and make it stop, because the ripple effect will devastate a country.

BK: What is next for yourself and for the film?

LFJ: There will be a Congo television broadcast, and we’re trying to maximize those events to improve the state within the country. I’m still taking it to dozens of film festivals and speaking with it, so that will continue at least for the next year. Domestic outreach is going to start seriously at the end of the year. We’re partnering with Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Lean Up Project, Global Witness, and half a dozen other organizations to get the film on their agenda. We’re trying to figure out some way to use the film to get the Congo on their agenda or to use the film to spring awareness within their various constituencies, whether it’s Human Rights Watch or Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. We’re going to organize a speaker’s bureau, teach-ins, and I’m really hoping that we can galvanize college and high school students the same way that a lot of people galvanized around Darfur, to pressure America to pay some attention to it, to bring some sort of focus to the resource wars and our being sort of complicit in the rape of women and girls because of all our electronic media. The film has taken on a bit of a life of its own, which has just been brilliant to watch. I’ve actually started another film, sort of on the same topic, about a group of displaced women living in the slums in Bogota, Columbia, and looking at the way that sexual violence is directly connected with displacement in a lot of situations. They are more forgotten women in a forgotten war. I’ve been to Columbia a lot this last year, and we’ll probably go there again in January when some of the major obligations on this film are out of the way.

BK: Do you believe that a moral obligation exists for people to become aware of not only this issue, but also other issues of its kind, and to do something about them?

LFJ: Yeah, I think that people should not look away. I think that there is a moral obligation, especially in the first world, to listen to others and to understand what is happening and understand our connection to it. You also have to pick your causes. The film is the ‘what’ and people who watch it need to figure out the ‘how,’ if you catch my drift, because I can’t tell people, “This is what you should do.” The film motivates people in different ways. It’s been part of my moral underpinning as a filmmaker to look at difficult stuff and to bring it to an audience that hadn’t considered it before. We’re also re-launching the film’s website in a couple weeks, and there’ll be a whole area of things to download, coalitions to join, and ways to give directly to the women, which is something we’ve been working on for a year. We’re trying to work with other NPOs that are in that area, where you can go to a safe website that’s based in Brussels and make a dedicated donation to bringing more mobile tribunals to that part of the world so that women in some of these villages in the Congo can actually have an ambulance come there once a week instead of once a month. It’s hard to know what to do, and the first thing I tell people is just educate yourself. The new website will have a whole reading list, for instance. There are already dozens of links where you can learn more, and I think the more people learn, the more they see where they fit in and where their personal activism can fit in.

Top photo courtesy of Chen Yerushalmi