Writing about the portrayal of sexual violence in cinema inevitably means writing about power. Regardless of the perspective you decide to take, one cannot help but dive into multiples “Who(s)”. Who is creating, who is looking, who is being looked at, is someone uncomfortable with the looking that is happening to them, who has been allowed to speak, and who ultimately got to decide what became visible for the audience?
Feminist film criticism has long questioned the assumption that visibility is liberating by nature, having learned from the fate of many women, that the violated female body can easily become an object for the audience’s gaze, and that their suffering can easily be transformed into spectacle. Yet, documentation of violence remains important, because, as women, we have learned the hard way that without documentation our pain remains largely unacknowledged.
So how can filmmakers decide to engage with such an important topic, extremely sensitive subjects and contexts, all the while remaining empathetic and ethical in their approach. I carried with me these dilemmas, and walked in with them into the DokuTalk: After Silence: Film, Testimony and Justice After Conflict-Related Sexual Violence.
Moderated by film scholar Sanjin Pejkovic, the conversation united activists and filmmakers Feride Rushiti, Alisa Kovalenko, Karla Condado, and researcher Erilda L. Lameborshi to discuss conflict, memory, gendered violence, and the politics of representing survivors. In addition to doing a favor for all of us who share their gender identity by occupying this space and articulating themselves so empathetically, these four women are also ensuring that whenever survivors of sexual violence are featured in documentary films, their dignity is carefully preserved.
Who owns a testimony once it has been confessed?
In the context of documenting war time sexual violence and gender-based violence, testimony is never “just a story”. Women survivors’ testimonies come along with fragile memories built upon a trauma they often try to repress, because it is too painful. Yet, through sharing, they are obliged to relive it, under extreme vulnerability and complex socio-political contexts, which oftentimes tend to view them as guilty for what happened to them.
That is why, approaching a testimony as such becomes one of the most difficult responsibilities a filmmaker undertakes, because once that testimony enters a film, it also navigates the terrains of authorship, spectatorship, media attention and public memory. The survivor may have spoken, but speaking does not mean surrendering their ownership to what has been testified.
For Feride Rushiti, whose decades of work with survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in Kosovo have been shaped by the absence of documentation as much as by the abundance of testimony, there should be no question of authorship at all. It must be clear, she says, that “the testimony is the property of the survivor alone.”
“We need to be reminded that whenever we engage with women victims of sexual violence, we have to have their consistent consent. Not simply consent at the beginning of a film, research project or book, but throughout its making, over and over, and after. Survivors need to know their rights, to be able to question what has been taken from their testimony, and to withdraw it whenever something no longer feels right. Their story does not belong to us, neither to the media, neither to the filmmakers. It is their property”
In a cinematic culture that often treats testimony as material to be gathered, edited and transformed into narratives that “suit an audience” this may sound like a radical proposition. It is not, really. Continuously taking the consent of survivors should never be an aspect to ignore, but to closely cherish and prioritize, as it allows filmmakers to continue developing a closer relationship with survivors, building the space for trust, instead of making them feel like they have been used, which often times, as Feride says, happens:
“Sometimes what happens when survivors are asked to provide their testimonies for documentaries, media interviews, films, the interaction of the filmmaker with them finishes with that interview,” Feride says, “survivors are not informed about what is the aim of that film, interview or media outlet. They have to know what will happen with that interview, what will happen to the sensitive information provided, otherwise they remain in fear that any detail included in the materials might reveal their identity.”
Surely, the camera does not automatically create an ethical space simply because someone has agreed to sit in front of it. Consent, then, cannot be treated as a signature, it has to remain an open conversation. This insistence on continuity is particularly significant when we consider the feminist history of testimony. Women who have experienced sexual violence have repeatedly been asked to prove, explain and retell what happened to them, to make their pain legible to institutions, courts, journalists, researchers and audiences. The demand for testimony can itself become another form of extraction when the person giving it loses control over what happens afterwards.
The panel discussion therefore offered an important reflection, proposing that maybe ethical filmmaking begins when we stop asking what can be “taken” from a testimony and start asking what are the conditions that filmmakers need to create to allow the person giving it to maintain trust, safety and agency over her own story.
For Alisa Kovalenko, the question of breaking silence was more personal. A documentary filmmaker and activist from Ukraine, Kovalenko was raped by a Russian officer while documenting the war in Donbas. She remained silent for almost two years, unable to find the language to speak about what had happened, before eventually encountering another woman who had experienced torture and sexual violence.
In her foundational essay, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”, Audre Lorde argues that women must speak their truths, even when afraid, because transforming unspoken pain into shared language builds connections and bridges differences among women. While self-revelation is terrifying, speaking real words bridges divides among women, while allowing them to examine the language they can use to fit into a world they believe in, giving each other strength to confront systemic violence.
Something similar seems to have happened to Kovalenko, as when she started talking to other survivors, another layer of solidarity was unfolded in front of her. As more women began speaking, Kovalenko described a shift from the isolation of individual trauma towards collective action, which also inspired her film: Traces.
For her, documentary became both a record of war crimes and an instrument of advocacy, a means not simply to break stigma, but to change narratives and position women as agents of change, because “for perpetrators, silent victims are appropriate,” she said.
There is a sharp political proposition inside that sentence. Silence is not always simply the absence of speech. It can be produced by shame, fear, stigma, social expectations, violence and the structures that make women feel responsible for what has been done to them. Breaking silence can therefore be an act of resistance.
But the panelists were all careful not to turn speaking up into another obligation for survivors. Filmmaker Karla Condado approached the conversation from an entirely different position, because in her case, there was no survivor left to speak. Her aunt Miriam was killed by her partner when Condado was thirteen. She grew up without understanding what had happened because her family never spoke about it. Her film emerged precisely from that absence.
By focusing on an intimate, time-transcending letter to her deceased aunt rather than the violence of her murder, she subverts the spectacle of femicide to explore the life that endured and the personal process of her slow grieving.
On architectures of absence
The dominant visual language of violence often demands the body, in cinema, the wounded body, the violated body, the dead body. Women’s suffering becomes legible through its visibility. But what happens when cinema refuses to provide that image? Erilda L. Lameborshi, whose intervention brought a critical perspective from Kosovo’s cinematic landscape, turned precisely towards this question through what she called the “architecture of absence”.
Reflecting on films such as Women Talking, she noted how sexual violence can remain almost entirely outside the frame and yet become palpable through the negotiations, silences and embodied responses of women. The violence does not disappear because it is not shown, she noted, it simply stops being offered to us, and this distinction becomes crucial.
Lameborshi argued that what we understand as silence or absence is not necessarily an absence of speech, emphasizing that “these can be forms of embodied speaking, ways in which women communicate experiences that dominant social codes do not know how to recognise.”
“There’s this notion that if you don’t show it, you haven’t dealt with it,” Lameborshi notes. “But that binary is false.”
Films such as Grbavica, Quo Vadis, Aida? and Kosovo’s own cinematic responses to war and violence demonstrate otherwise. The massacre does not need to be visually reproduced for us to understand that it is happening. The question is not simply whether violence is represented, but whose experience the representation is serving. Is the film serving the testimony of the woman who lived through it? Or is it serving the audience’s need for catharsis?
According to Lameborshi, when resilience is represented without dignity in filmmaking, it ceases to be resilience and becomes a way for the audience to extract emotional release from someone else’s suffering. The survivor is no longer the centre of the story - the audience is. This is exactly the dynamic that ethical filmmaking must resist. For Kovalenko, the ethical centre of Traces became increasingly clear as she followed women through their recovery. She realised that the film was not ultimately about trauma, pain or war crimes, but about “human dignity conquering this evil.” That shift completely changed the meaning behind her film.
Looking back at the Berlinale screening of her movie, Kovalenko explained how survivors travelled from their villages to attend the screening. She remembers watching the audience stand and applaud, and seeing the women cry. “That screening was healing for them,” she says. But she did not understand those tears as pity, rather, as recognition.
Perhaps this is what an ethical cinema on sexual violence can offer, certainly not the satisfaction of having seen everything, but the possibility of seeing differently.
When speaking about ethics in filmmaking that navigate through difficult topics such as sexual violence, we need not to be bold and require cinematic standards that are able to develop a language around silences, a form from absences, consent as an ongoing relationship based on trust, and dignity as something that must never become collateral damage in the pursuit of “a powerful story.”
This article is written by Valmira Rashiti for the fourth issue of DokuDaily, Dokufest XXV, published on 10 August 2026.