Films by Kumjana Novakova and Kaori Oda

Foča is a municipality in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina where women were raped and abused on a large scale during the Bosnian war. Women, and girls as young as 12 years old, were imprisoned at various locations to be gang-raped, mostly by Serbian fighters. This was cause for the Yugoslavia Tribunal to designate “systematic rape” and “sexual slavery”—war crimes that frequently went unprosecuted—as torture and crimes against humanity. As a result, these crimes can now be universally prosecuted. The so-called Foča case called on great courage from the countless women who testified about their horrific experiences. To preserve their anonymity the women were identified using numbers or letters. In the forensic video essay, Silence of Reason (North Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina) filmmaker Kumjana Novakova uses mostly written testimonies by the women to explore the collective memory of the rape camps. In grainy video footage, the camera explores the places where these inhuman crimes took place, while the women speak about the unspeakable.

Toward the end of the Second World War, Okinawa was the scene of a bloody battle. The Japanese island is now green and serene, but on April 1, 1945, US troops landed to begin a battle that cost a horrific number of lives. The dead also included many civilians who were hiding in caves, such as Chibichirigama, where 140 people had fled to escape the fighting. A day after the invasion, on April 2, 83 of them committed suicide. They had been wrongly told that if they surrendered they would be slaughtered or tortured by the Americans. Narrator and guide Mitsuo Matsunaga’s account of their senseless suicide is delivered in a monotone voice, but is emotional nonetheless. In Gama (Japan), filmmaker Kaori Oda has placed him in the setting of the abandoned caves, where the memories of the violence originated, as a connector to the past. He is joined by a mysterious woman who listens and observes him like a ghost, as he sometimes literally unearths the traces of the suffering hidden in the underground landscape.

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