At one point in “An Army of Women,” Jennifer Ecklund is doing the math regarding sexual assault cases in Austin, Texas, noting that out of the thousand reported incidents that have made it into the court system, just one made it to trial during the tenure of District Attorney Margaret Moore and although that number is appalling, the figure somehow seems worse when she reveals it wasn’t one of the countless women that tried to bring charges, but a man whose claims were considered worthy of pursuing a prosecution. As Ecklund says, “At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what laws you make if you don’t enforce them.”
Ecklund and her partner Elizabeth Myers at Thompson Coburn have the unenviable task of filing suit in the same system that has long denied survivors of sexual assault justice in Julie Lunde Lillesæter’s inspiring doc, but the class action they undertake isn’t the only form of recourse they can seek with clientele who are passionate about making sure that others won’t receive the same treatment they did upon reporting the crimes against them. When their testimony has seemingly fallen on deaf ears by both local police and subsequently by the D.A.’s office which doesn’t see the testimony of the women as enough evidence to take their cases, the survivors are brought together for a civil suit where stepping out of anonymity is an enormous act of bravery when their attackers remain out in the open and collectively raise one another’s voices when they start to get involved in local politics to hopefully oust Moore from her elected position, finding that success in the court of public opinion could help their efforts at the Travis County Courthouse.
When the survivors start to find success within the system by charting their own path, the same could be said of Lillesæter, a native of Norway who is able to bring an outsider’s eye to the failings of the American legal system but deeply attuned to the sensitivities of the survivors and what they see in a local government that doesn’t appear to want to hear from them. Connecting with an artist who goes by Amy when she remains incognito, as well as Hanna, a longtime resident of Austin who has since become an advocate for sexual assault survivors since someone slipped something into her drink, and Marina, a former student at the University of Texas who was assaulted on Sixth Street and volunteers tirelessly for Moore’s rival for DA, Lillesæter follows the women along with their lawyers slowly gathering momentum for their case and building a movement that will extend beyond a resolution for their own experiences.
Shortly before “An Army of Women” premieres in Austin as part of SXSW, Lillesæter generously took time before the festival to talk about how she became interested in the class action lawsuit that began in 2018, working with subjects who couldn’t always be identified publicly and how a commitment to social justice has informed the types of documentary projects she takes on.
What drew you to this?
I lived in Austin for about a year and I’d always felt it was a quite safe and progressive place and then I learned about this lawsuit from a local news story and how the system was really, really failing women. I think I had started naively thinking that when sexual assaults happen, there would be a system in place to actually handle them properly and then make sure they don’t happen again. Then when I read the lawsuit and I saw the response from the police and the DA, I realized that the people in charge did not seem very interested in fixing those issues, so I became interested in following the lawsuit to see what the outcome might be and whether or not survivors could actually force this change that was really needed.
What was it like to set up a production like this since I know there’s a crew in Austin and also one abroad?
My husband is from Austin, so I was living there, but I am Norwegian and have a production company in Norway and when I started working on this project, we were able to get financing from the Norwegian Film Institute, so it is a Norwegian production, but I worked with local team members, especially on the bigger events that happened, but for the most part, it was mostly just me and my camera.
Both sensitivities and anonymity must guide this process from the very start. How did you even know how you could make a film about this?
It’s an incredibly sensitive subject, and before I started, I reached out to Jenny and Elizabeth, the lawyers, and said, “This is a really important story that I would love to tell, but I want to make sure that this is something you want, and that the plaintiffs in the lawsuit want that.” They said that they would introduce me to some of the plaintiffs and they asked them who would want to meet with me. Marina and Hanna, who became the main protagonists, were among the ones who reached out and were interested and when I met them and saw that they really wanted a film like this to be made, not just for their own healing process, but also to document all their efforts because they were really doing so much [as] advocates trying to get some focus on this issue, I realized that something like this could be really important to inspire people in other places. It’s a tricky balance with a subject like this, but the protagonists that I had in the film were really at a place where they were trying to force this change and saw the film as an opportunity to also process some of their own experiences.
I was so impressed with how you were able to keep the focus so tight on this, and obviously, you reach out to the District Attorney Margaret Moore and some of the other people [in local government and law enforcement], but did you know from the start that it could be that those three people, as well as the lawyers, who could carry this story?
I knew from the start that I wanted to focus on the plaintiff’s perspective. I was interested in understanding what it was like for a survivor to report, and then what it was like to actually challenge the criminal justice system legally, so it felt natural to have a very strict focus on them and their perspective. It’s also the style of verite documentary that I do that follows the person. It’s very close to the protagonists and it didn’t feel right for me to then go over to Margaret Moore and start interviewing her if that was not something they were doing, so I always tried to think about how do they interact with the system. With the district attorney, the only way they interacted with the DA was when they saw her on [television] because she did not want to meet with them, so as a result, that’s how she’s presented in the film.
It seems like you have both a passion for filmmaking and social justice to go by the work of your production company Differ Films. Were those things that always naturally coalesced?
I got into filmmaking not by going to film school or having all these grand dreams about making films, but from more from the social justice realm. I did photography for a while, especially to raise awareness about social issues and then I got an offer to do cinematography on a documentary about climate change. I really enjoyed working with moving images and then the director of that film and I decided to start Differ to make the films that we really wanted to make and thought the world needed to see. We’ve been able to make it work by also doing impact producing, doing impact campaigns for our documentaries but also others and help partner with grassroots organizations that can use these documentaries to create change. That’s always how we choose the projects – can this film have an impact? And is it something that we’re willing to put a lot of time and effort into, even after the film is done, to make sure that the impact will actually happen?
Was there anything that happened on this that changed your ideas of what it could be?
Probably when I met Amy about a year after I started filming. When I got to know her and I saw that she was interested in being a part of the film, it took her a little longer because she had been anonymous. And my very last shoot was her working on her painting [that now frames the film]. I realized her story could be a core thread throughout the film, but that came quite late in the process.
That painting in particular ends up playing such a big role and it’s a beautiful piece of artwork.
It really is, and I didn’t know that would happen. I had filmed her paint in the past because that’s how she processes things. And we talked about me filming a full painting, but I didn’t know exactly what she would paint or if she would do it until the day before, so when I saw what she was doing, it was really, really beautiful.
What it’s like to get to this place of starting to get the film out into the world?
It’s amazing. It’s a little scary since it’s my first feature. I’ve worked on it for such a long time and it’s just been a lot of material that I have inside of my head. It was a long journey editing it and I had a baby, so the last six months have been quite intense, but it feels good to be able to get it out into the world and see what kind of feedback we get.
“An Army of Women” will screen at SXSW on March 8th at 2 pm at the Zach Theatre, March 12th at 2:45 pm at the Rollins Theatre at the Long Center and March 15th at 6 pm at the AFS Cinema.