An Army of Women review – shocking story of sex-assault survivors’ fight for justice

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Julie Lunde Lillesæter’s timely documentary tells the story of the courageous women whose cases of sexual assault and rape have gone unheard by the US judicial system In 2018, a historic lawsuit was brought against the US city of Austin, Travis County, the Austin Police Department, and the Travis County District Attorney’s Office. The plaintiffs were survivors of sexual assault, whose cases had gone unheard by the judicial system. Gripping and timely, Julie Lunde Lillesæter’s riveting documentary follows these courageous women as they fight for justice. The film lays bare the shocking details concerning how sex crimes were treated in the county. In one year, between July 2016 and June 2017, of more than 220 cases presented for prosecution, only one went to trial – and the victim in this instance was male. Testimony from the survivors reveal the harrowing extent to which officials turned a blind eye; even with scientific evidence such as DNA matches, the majority of criminal filings w...
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Best films of 2023 in the UK: No 4 – 20 Days in Mariupol

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Filmed as Russia invaded Ukraine’s port city, Mstyslav Chernov’s documentary is gruelling, compelling and vital

Mstyslav Chernov’s horrifying eyewitness documentary 20 Days in Mariupol is about Vladimir Putin’s brutal siege of the Ukrainian port city, from February to May 2022, resulting in more than 20,000 deaths. It is effectively the director’s cut: the gruelling unexpurgated text of this Associated Press journalist’s original video reports from within the city for western news outlets. They were, even in their packaged version, gruellingly tough – and Chernov’s images of mass graves did a very great deal, even in edited form, to galvanise western opinion and to subdue dissenting thoughts that supporting Zelenskiy wasn’t worth it and that Nato had provoked the Russians.

But the full material is wrenching: this film is really a broadcast from hell on earth. Chernov shows in unflinching detail the shattered bodies of men, women and children, and even more unbearably shows the agony of loved ones sobbing over the corpses: a blaze of emotional pain almost obscene in its directness. And Chernov and his photographer Evgeniy Maloletka are themselves part of the story. Their subjects are always reacting to their appearance: sometimes they angrily tell the film-makers to go away. But sometimes, and with almost the same kind of despairing rage, they tell them to stay, to record what they are going through, to be a witness to the horror. Ukrainian troops at one stage rescue Chernov and Maloletka from a hospital in which they had been trapped by snipers. Their capture by Russian personnel would undoubtedly have been a counter-propaganda coup for Putin.

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