01About this film.
"Rape is being used as a weapon of war. It is systematic. It is planned." United Nations report, 2024.
Violence Against Women is built around a single sentence from a UN report and four women whose names you will hear: Enat, twenty-one, from South Gondar; Tigist, eighteen, from West Gojjam; Kalkidan Addisu, fourteen, from Gishabay, West Gojjam; and Heaven Awot, seven, from Bahir Dar. Their identities are public — through the BBC investigation of November 2024, through Amhara Association of America documentation, through their own families' decisions to speak. They stand in for the thousands whose names have not been recorded.
The film draws on a single body of evidence assembled across multiple institutions. The Physicians for Human Rights & OJAH joint study analysed five hundred and fifteen medical records and surveyed six hundred and fifty-seven healthcare workers. Amnesty International's 2024 Ethiopia report includes sixty-three survivor interviews. Human Rights Watch published a regional report in June 2024. The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission has documented over two hundred cases since July 2021. The figures the film cites are the lowest verified across these sources.
02The structure of harm.
Sexual violence in the Amhara conflict is not the act of isolated combatants. It is, as the UN concluded, systematic. The Physicians for Human Rights study described patterns observable across geographies and across the affiliations of perpetrators: rape used to punish suspected affiliations, to displace populations, to terrorise communities into compliance. In some cases survivors reported being forced to watch the killing of their husbands or fathers before being raped. In others the violence was committed in the presence of children.
The film discusses these patterns soberly and without graphic imagery. It uses ElevenLabs voice-over to read survivor testimony rather than dramatised reconstructions, in keeping with the editorial principle of the consortium: protect those who cannot consent, and let the institutional record speak.
03What the silence means.
The accumulation of institutional reports has not produced accountability. The U.S. State Department made a War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity determination in March 2023. The OHCHR has issued statements throughout 2021–2024. The Ethiopian government has, in many cases, denied the specific findings. International press coverage has been limited by the regional telecommunications blackout. The PHR report’s central argument — that the silence enables more violence — is the editorial argument of the film.
The film closes with three actions. Demand an independent UN investigation. Support human rights and aid organisations working with survivors. Share, with the hashtag #BreakTheSilenceAmhara. The hashtag is a coordinating tool, not a substitute for institutional pressure. Each of the three actions is, in our view, necessary and insufficient on its own.
04A note on identification and dignity.
Where a survivor's name appears in the film, it is either already public through an institutional source (BBC, AAA documentation, an EHRC case file) or used with the explicit consent of family members. No image of a survivor is shown without that survivor's documented consent or that of their family where the survivor is a child. No medical detail is included that has not been published by the underlying institutional source.
The consortium is bound by the "Do No Harm" principle of the Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices and by the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma guidelines. Where a tension between visual authenticity and survivor safety arose during production, safety was always chosen. This is also a methodological choice: a film that does not protect those it represents is not, in our view, a legitimate film.