Ethical Filmmaking with Survivor Stories
By Yixuan Zeng
My struggles with the trauma I carry from sexual violence are something I’m very open about. It’s been years since my rape occurred, and I can now talk openly about the long term effects of PTSD and my continued struggles with my mental health. I can talk about the way my trauma has impacted my relationships and how I see other people, and I can now offer unrestrained support to people I love who are, unfortunately, going through similar things. But in the early days of my trauma, when the pain was incredibly raw and the nightmares were recurrent, when I felt alone in my experiences and desperate for comfort, there was an allure to consuming the stories of other survivors in any form I could find. I wanted to hear others talk about their experiences when I wasn’t yet ready to, and to see what healing looked like for them when I couldn’t yet imagine it for myself. I wanted to hear people say that they, too, know what it feels like to be drowning in a black abyss of hopelessness, but that they found a way out afterwards. I wanted to see vulnerability, to find solidarity, and to feel that everything would ultimately be okay.
Instead, I mostly found stories that prioritized telling those traumatic events in explicit details so audiences could grasp the horror of the situation when they hadn’t experienced anything like it first-hand. I consistently came up against the gap between what I was looking for in these stories as a survivor myself, and media that was created with the purpose of educating an untraumatized audience. Oftentimes, these stories made me feel more alienated and unsure in how I should be defining my own experiences — I found myself comparing the gruesome details of their trauma to those of mine, wondering if it was really “bad enough” to count, and minimizing my own trauma to myself. The media I consumed very often took a voyeuristic feel towards survivors by lingering on the grisly details of the sexual violence they experienced. It reduced their identity to what fits within the bounds of a “victim” narrative, and over the course of a film would streamline their personhood into a series of traumatic events and whatever ripple effects that’s had on other parts of their lives. Like so many survivors realize, my experience with the very media I wanted to find solace in ended up being further traumatizing. I quickly learned it wasn’t worth the panic attacks and mental spiraling just for the small chance at finding a glimpse of hope through someone else’s truncated journey.
Disintegrate, Reintegrate — Personal artwork encapsulating the way trauma and recovery has not been linear for me, but rather a cyclical journey. CREDIT: Yixuan Zeng
There can be a dangerous disparity between the good intentions behind wanting to highlight and consume survivor stories, and the unintended harm resulting from the practices used in creating, distributing, and marketing these films. When filmmakers and audiences operate primarily as outsiders looking in, it becomes all too easy to fall back on our existing norms of media creation and consumption that, when uncritically applied to survivors and stories of deep trauma, can leave them feeling discarded at the end of the filmmaking and distribution process. Our privilege often manifests as voyeuristically extracting survivor stories from a place of well-meaning curiosity and then retreating back into the comfort of our own lives once the credits roll, safely distanced from the trauma we just vicariously ingested. As audiences, we’re accustomed to being served with (and have thus come to expect) stories that come with neatly packaged resolutions — that evildoers face punishment, our institutions protect us, and there’s a happy ending waiting for our protagonist — and it can feel unsatisfying when a story can’t provide that. But wanting to conform stories of sexual violence to familiar narrative arcs is harmfully reductive, when trauma itself is messy, complicated, and can look very different from person to person. When we’re being entrusted with people’s intimate experiences from a time when they were at their most vulnerable, we need to be fully cognizant of the harm we can cause by mishandling them, however unintentionally. Responsibly handling the stories of survivors of sexual trauma requires ongoing care and intent through the process, and a real commitment towards the sustained wellbeing of your participants. How can we highlight survivor stories without being exploitative? How do we talk about trauma in ways that maintain the dignity and humanity of survivors? How do we engage in the practice of filmmaking without retraumatizing participants? And how do we enable our audiences to move beyond just passively consuming these stories and towards taking tangible and meaningful action in their lives and in their communities?
Centering Survivor Stories: A Filmmaking Series, produced by Re-Present Media CREDIT: Yixuan Zeng/Re-Present Media
Centering Survivor Stories was a series of filmmaker workshops created to discuss ethical filmmaking practices in pursuit of answers to these questions. Held in September 2022 and co-presented by Re-Present Media, The Video Consortium, and Art Works Project, these in-depth interactive workshops were aimed at demonstrating survivor-centered filmmaking and educating nonfiction storytellers in their ongoing work with survivors. The goal was to provide case studies of this approach in filmmaking and how filmmakers can apply them to current/future projects. The workshops featured four films that illustrated ethical filmmaking strategies and informed consent practices with their film participants: Still I Rise (dir. Sheri Shuster), The Long Rescue (dir. Jennifer Huang), The Apology (dir. Tiffany Hsiung), and Letter to my Child From Rape (dir. Bernadette Vivuya).
Re-Present Media’s interest in Survivor Centered Filmmaking Practices initially arose during our advocacy campaign to bring awareness to the unethical practices in the making of Sabaya, a film featuring Yazidi survivors of sexual enslavement. As part of the campaign, we realized it’s not enough to protest the wrongdoings and abuses in the filmmaking process and to demand accountability from filmmakers and media arts institutions, but that we also have to offer a path forward for filmmakers that do want to responsibly engage with survivor stories. We have to share knowledge of what works, and to share the positive experiences of filmmakers who have done the work with care and intention. Often, it’s women of color filmmakers that are putting careful consideration into employing on-going practices of informed consent over the course of production, but their practices are not necessarily being elevated because they may feel reluctant to self-identify as experts on the matter. Centering Survivor Stories was created as an intentional space for some of these filmmakers to share their practices around ensuring survivors and their stories are treated with care and respect, and to establish a safe space for others to ask questions, discuss their concerns, and learn new strategies. Rather than recording the workshop series, we decided to write a document to cover the high-level themes and lessons learned so that it could be circulated widely beyond the immediate workshop participants, while also protecting the privacy of participating individuals and the details of their films. The reception to the series has been extremely positive, demonstrating a real willingness among nonfiction filmmakers to educate themselves and adjust their practices to reduce harm and help ensure their work with trauma survivors will be beneficial to them.
There has been a steady and gradual cultural shift in the U.S. towards listening to and believing survivors since those early days of struggling with my sexual trauma in isolation, culminating with the visibility of the #MeToo movement. This has brought mainstream exposure to the insidious and pervasive nature of rape culture, shining a light on how we’ve historically treated survivors of all forms of sexual violence when they come forth with their stories. Articles in mainstream publications detail the injustices of survivors being blamed for their assaults, and there’s growing awareness that the criminal justice system is notoriously ineffectual with cases of sexual violence. The contrast in these shifting attitudes was crystalized in the recent verdict in Carroll v. Trump, where tired tropes about victimhood clashed on the national stage with new baseline standards of empathy for survivors. Trump’s defense consisted of all the greatest hits of victim-blaming — “why didn’t you scream?”, “why didn’t you report it to the police?”, “why didn’t you come out with this story sooner?” — that has helped fortify the myth of the ‘Perfect Victim,’ meant to discredit any survivor who doesn’t fit within this impossible mold. Even still, the former president was found liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll by a jury of everyday Americans, marking a historic win and bringing some semblance of comfort to survivors like myself who know what it’s like to be met with those same lines of accusatory questioning. Although we can celebrate these isolated milestones as our culture slowly trends towards greater awareness towards sexual violence, individual survivors still face significant obstacles or, depending on respective circumstances, overwhelming risk in going public with their stories. For many survivors, the weight of stigma and shame can still feel insurmountably immense, contributing to both individual and collective silence around the realities of sexual violence and its aftermath.
But as storytellers and artists, we are some of the best equipped to do the work of dismantling these barriers in our culture at large. When done right, films centered on survivors of trauma have the extraordinary potential to break through silence and dissipate shame. We can not only deepen understanding and bridge gaps in empathy, but we can offer validation and comfort to survivors who are desperate to feel less alone in traumas that feel both too shameful to talk about and too suffocating to process, as I once felt. We can build safe havens for trauma survivors through thoughtful and intentional practices, providing them a space where they can privately examine the bounds of their own pain while safely exploring what healing and recovery might look like when modeled by others. We can provide solace and solidarity to survivors through on-screen stories that validate their own. And we can do it by elevating the work of filmmakers that are already doing this work, sharing and building on existing knowledge, and creating systems of ethical practices and support for each other.
Yixuan Zeng is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose work explores themes of identity, intergenerational relationships, and trauma recovery. They have worked with various Asian American film festivals to build community through elevating underrepresented stories. Previously, they served as the programming director for the Boston Asian American Film Festival and are now currently the in-house designer for the Seattle Asian American Film Festival. Yixuan is presently working with Re-Present Media on creating the documentation for the Centering Survivor Stories Filmmaker Series, which will be released later this year.
Find Yixuan on social media
Instagram: @gorgoneia
Re-Present Media
Website: https://re-presentmedia.org/
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