A powerful Australian film aims to shift conversations, change cultures and make it safer for women to speak out against gendered violence by reforming the laws that seek to silence them.
The highly anticipated documentary Silenced opened the Sydney Film Festival with its Australian premier on Wednesday night.
Emmy-winning director Selina Miles follows acclaimed human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson as she fights against the weaponisation of defamation law by alleged perpetrators.
It charts a post #MeToo world, using courtroom footage, media coverage and interviews to demonstrate how legal systems across the world are being used to discredit both victim-survivors and the journalists who report their stories.
Former Liberal Party staffer Brittany Higgins tells her story in the film, having participated in both a criminal and civil trial following allegations Bruce Lehrmann raped her inside Parliament House in 2019.
While the 2022 criminal trial was derailed due to juror misconduct, during the civil case brought by Lehrmann in 2024, the Federal Court found, on the balance of probabilities, that reports of the rape were substantially true.
In Silenced, Ms Higgins reflects on the toll of the cases on her mental health but ultimately says she hopes the experience is a footnote in her life story, not the headliner.
"You may know my name, you may see my face in this documentary, but I am representative of your friends, and your neighbours, and your sisters, and your mothers," Ms Higgins told the audience following the screening.
"It's not about me as a person, it's about the systemic problem that is continuing to be persistent and pervasive in our culture, and the way that it is metastasising and changing in this new online era."
In 2020, Ms Robinson represented Amber Heard during defamation proceedings brought against the actress in the United Kingdom by her former husband Johnny Depp, which he lost.
The film charts the case, as well as a second civil suit Depp brought against his ex-wife in the United States, during which the jury sided with him.
Ms Higgins and Ms Heard met in London while filming Silenced.
"You're in a really, really un-fun club, you're not alone in it," Ms Heard tells Ms Higgins.
It also features the story of Colombian journalist Catalina Ruiz-Navarro, who was sued by director Ciro Guerra after publishing an article in which eight women accused him of sexual harassment and abuse.
The documentary was inspired by Ms Robinson's book, How Many More Women? co-authored with Dr Keio Yoshida, which examines how the legal system can be deployed to silence women.
Ms Robinson hoped the film would challenge audiences on what they think they knew about the cases featured.
"We really wanted to show the real, lived experience of human rights, and what it looks like to seek justice, the very physical and emotional toll it takes on both women who are survivors and the journalists who try to hold power to account," she told AAP.
"I want to raise awareness about these problems and why we need to fix it, because we can't have a functional democracy unless we protect these rights."
It is Ms Robinson's hope that the film would be used as a tool to educate and facilitate law reform.
"We want to use this film as a tool," she said.
"We want to show it in parliament (and) at the United Nations to create law reform, to make it safer for women to speak out, to make it easier for journalists to tell their stories."
The Sydney Film Festival runs from June 3 to 14.
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