Description

Catalyzing Possibility: The NO! Film Documentary as Community Accountability Technology

This discussion explores how media makers and organizers have employed NO! as a powerful tool for navigating through painful fault lines in anti-rape discourse and actualizing the potential for meaningful individual and collective responses to violence. This striking 2006 documentary examines sexual violence against black women by black men, primarily using black women survivors’ vivid testimony and analysis. The interview is with Aishah Shahidah Simmons, NO!’s producer and director, and Theryn Kigvamasud’Vashti, a black feminist activist in Seattle who organized multiple community screenings of NO! They reveal how this film is a community accountability artifact in its own right and a potent cinematic instrument that catalyzes critical reconsiderations of the problem, circumstances, and consequences of sexual violence against black women, manifesting the possibility for recognition and change.

violence, rape, black women, film, community accountability, community organizing, African-American women

Citation: Social Justice Vol. 37, No. 4 (2010-11): 60-75.