With permission, we made this film using the testimonies of women who shared their experiences with us. Their words were voiced by a mixture of professional and emerging actors.
We have a duty to protect the people who said those words, as well as women who may find affinity and commonality with what is voiced.
The point of the film is to continue these conversations. The same conversations that have been happening publicly and privately for, well, ever.
The language of this review was originally damaging, having spoken to UK Film Review, some of that has been changed. Whilst we acknowledge and appreciate that changes have been made to the language, we are still concerned that the issues around the tone of the review have not been addressed.
A review which doesn’t appear to recognise that this isn’t – unfortunately – a new headline belittles the ongoing fight. If anything, it underscores and makes the content even more relevant, however inadvertently. When these issues weren’t confronted, the message of our film became, if possible, more important.
We hope to share ‘breaking the silence.’ with a wider audience at film festivals, and eventually via digital distribution, and allow it to be another beacon in the fight for equal rights for 49.6% of the global population. In doing so, we also acknowledge the problematics with seeing gender as binary, and share this message with other gender recognitions who face gendered violence on a daily basis.
The artistic merit of a film is up for grabs, the belittling of its message definitely should not be.
Lauren Gill – Director, co-writer
Ivan Mack – co-producer, co-writer
Dermot Daly – co-producer, co-writer
(The review in question, by UK Film Review, can be found here.)
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