SILENCE OF REASON

Their identities protected, made anonymous behind numbers or letter abbreviations, multiple women from the Bosnian-Herzegovinian town of Foča recount systematic rapes perpetrated against them by Serbian soldiers during the Yugoslav War. In the main, Kumjana Novakova presents the accounts in her documentary film in text form, alongside several cases related in a distorted auditory format. In addition, the accounts are accompanied by archival images and videos from the sites where the crimes occurred. Taken together, they form a cinematic collage that leaves the viewer speechless and appalled. The stories are directly derived from witnesses' statements for the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague in 2000. These reports were the impetus for the first-ever resolution on the part of an international court to consider rape during wartime as a method of torture. Consequently, this means that such acts count as civil rights violations and can thus be prosecuted as such under criminal law. In testifying, these women have dared to make a vital contribution towards increasing awareness of a war crime that had previously been systematically ignored by the history books and repressed from our collective memory.