BRATTLEBORO — It couldn't happen to her. It couldn't happen here. A different continent. A different woman. But not here. Not now. But it did. To her.
The Women's Film Festival's film selection committee calls As If I Am Not There the festival's “most powerful” film this year, a timeless drama that tells a difficult story some may find hard to watch.
The film is based on the novel of the same name by Croatian author Slavenka Drakulic. The book recounts the horrors in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995, when tens of thousands of women were systematically raped as part of a sick “ethnic cleansing” campaign against Muslims.
This is what happens to Samira, the lead character in the drama.
Director Juanita Wilson's drama is taken from true stories revealed during the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague.
Angelina Jolie wrote and directed the recently released In the Land of Blood and Honey, a drama about a romance between a Serbian soldier and a Bosnian woman in the 1990s war, which covers similar territory. That film has won critical acclaim but has also raised ire for its depictions of violence, sexual and otherwise.
Beautifully shot and acted, As If I'm Not There won Best Film and Best Director at the Irish Film and Television awards, where Macedonian newcomer Natasha Petrovic, who plays Samira, was nominated for Best International Actress.
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The film opens with Samira leaving her family in Sarajevo to begin a teaching job in a village whose horse-drawn wagons convey a time long before 1992, the year the film takes place. A bus winds its way through mountains freckled with storybook villages, and we feel a new chapter is about to begin.
Suspense builds as Samira ignores the ominous signs of impending conflict: the missing teacher whom she replaces, the families fleeing in the cover of darkness, the machine gun fire drowned out by the laughter of her students.
Her naiveté dissolves as ethnic tensions come to a head.
In one scene, Serb rebel soldiers separate the Bosniak townspeople into two groups; women and children on one side, men on the other. We watch the women's eyes as sons, husbands, and fathers are marched outside and the sounds of gunshots pierce the air.
Specially selected women, both young and old, are forced into a special house where the “labor” they endure is systematic rape.
Rape as a tool of war is a topic that the media rarely covers. Yet sexual violence has been an increasing method of war in the past century.
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During the Holocaust, thousands of Jewish and Roma woman were raped in an effort to humiliate and ethnically cleanse.
More than 100,000 indigenous women were also raped in Guatemala in the late 20th century, an act sanctioned by their government.
Rape was used a weapon during the uprisings in Egypt and Libya last year. It happens every five minutes to a woman in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
As If I'm Not There brings the realities of rape as a weapon of war to the screen. Of all the violence in the film, it is the only savagery the director allows the audience to witness firsthand. It is important for the audience to bear witness to these scenes, to acknowledge a reality that too many women across the world face every day.
Reports from Bosnia show men were victims of rape as well during the conflict. Mirroring a true incident, a solider is forced to rape Samira in the film.
In a film where dialogue is used sparingly, one of the most poignant moments is when Samira declares: “This is who I am. A woman.”
This declaration in the face of violence marks Samira's decision to move beyond victimization to reclaim her humanity. She could be a woman staking out her freedom anywhere you might find her.
Her choice for self-preservation raises the stakes, especially with her fellow prisoners, who accuse her of inviting violence upon herself. The audience is left questioning what one would do in her place.
As If I'm Not There brings to movie screens a difficult story that must be told, a story that rawly forces us to confront the universal truth of humanity's crimes, recognize how the seed of violence lurks in everyone, and raises hope that love can emerge from the worst situations and - somehow - triumph.