Educational Media Reviews Online

Through a provocative autobiographical essay format, this brief but pungent documentary lends a vividly personal edge to an exploration of the thorny cultural and legal complexities and ambiguities surrounding the issue of sexual consent by taking its inspiration from the emotionally charged context of an incident its director, Nancy Schwartzman, experienced during what began as a consensual sexual encounter. As a young American woman working in Jerusalem, Schwartzman returned from a party with a non-American work colleague to his home where, while engaging in consensual vaginal intercourse she was, as she recounts, forcibly penetrated anally. Soon after the incident, she quit her job and returned to New York City, where as a college student she had been actively involved in feminist advocacy.

Schwartzman recounts her sharing of the experience with friends, which generates a wide variety of responses, including some indifferent and unsupportive ones at odds with her characterization of what happened as rape, prompting a cursory survey of attitudes and perceptions of sexual violence abounding in popular culture. She features a friend who was attacked and raped by a stranger, examines legal redress options, interviews several attorneys who specialize in sexual assault, and visits the Bunny Ranch brothel in Nevada where prostitutes discuss their consent policies and protocols with uncooperative clients.

Lingering unease eventually impels Schwartzman to obtain personal closure by returning to Jerusalem to meet with her former colleague and surreptitiously record, apparently under the pretense of a conversation, an interrogation with a hidden camera and microphone. The resulting encounter—or at least the recorded portions of it she selects for appearance in the film—while perhaps of doubtful therapeutic value to Schwartzman is nevertheless an instructive moment for viewers in its discomfiting revelation of the divergence between how she and he recollect and define the event which precipitated the film, and raising the further possibility that cultural difference may have been an aggravating factor.

Some viewers might find questionable aspects of the partiality embedded in Schwartzman’s examination of her own experience, but such a critical attitude is likely to enhance rather than encumber the powerful effect of her broader aim of stimulating serious reflection and conversation about sexual violence and what constitutes sexual consent.